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THE 



Bible of Humanity 



JULES MICHELET, 



TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH 



BY 



VINCENZO CALFA. 



WITH A NEW AND COMPLETE INDEX. 



NEW YORK: 
J. W. BOUTON, 706 BROADWAY. 

LONDON : B. QUARITCH, 15 PICCADILLY. 
1877. 



. .146, 



[t^B UlUlT 

Lf C0*G1M* 

WA8H1 WQTOW 



1./ 



Copyright by 

j. W. BOUTON, 

1877. 



John F. Trow & Son, 

Printers and Stereotypers, 

205-213 East iv.th St., 

NEW YORK. 



TO 

CHEVALIER PIETRO CENTEMERI, 

WHO, IN 1848 AND 1S49, 

FOUGHT FOR THE INDEPENDENCE 

AND 

RELIGIOUS LIBERTY OF ITALY, 

•d'jlis translation is inserting 

BY 

HIS COUNTRYMAN AND FRIEND, 

VINCENZO CALFA. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Preface iii 

J) art Smt 

THE CHILDREN OF THE SUN 
CHAPTER I. 

INDIA. 

The R&mayana I 

The Bible of goodness 2 

The Ramayana dissimilar from the Iliad 3 

Hidden mystery of the Hindoo soul 4 

How Ancient India was recovered 5 

Anquetil Duperron and the Indianists 5,6 

The Zend-Avesta and the Vedas 7 

The Mahabharata.— The Shah-Nameh.— The Rig- Veda 7 

Indian Art 8 

Exhibition of 1 85 1 9 

Domestication of the elephant 13 

Primitive family. — Primitive worship 15 

Song of the dawn. — Monogamy. — The Lady 18 

The lady unites in the sacrifice and joins in the anthem 21 

Man creates the gods 22 

Deep-rooted liberties of India 30 

The Ramayana is an emancipation 32 

Redemption of Nature 37 

The animal rehabilitated, humanized 42 

Infinite pardon 46 

CHAPTER II. 

PERSIA. 

The Earth and the Tree of Life 48 

Heroic toil. — Life and light in justice 49 

To do justice to fire, to the earth, and to the animal 49 



vi Table of Contents, 

PAGE 

To evoke water and to fertilize the earth 50 

The Tree of Life, Homa 51, 52 

Man by the word produces and upholds the world 53 

The combat of Good and Evil 53 

"Iran against Turan. — The dragon of Assyria 55 

Labor, order, justice. — Regular distribution of waters 57 

Fight of Ormuzd against Ahriman 57 

All the good help Ormuzd in order to conquer and reconcile Ahriman. .. 58 

The Winged Soul. — It ought to be the image of Law 61 

Anxiety about the ultimate destiny of the soul 62 

The sun sucks up the body ; the bird takes the soul 64 

The soul is received by an angel ; its transfiguration 65, 66 

The Eagle and the Serpent 67 

Persia venerates the Eagle — Assyria worships the Dragon 68 

The emancipator of Persia 69 

Persia wishes to purify Asia with the sword of fire 70 

The Shah Nameh 72 

The strong woman 72 

Worship of water-springs 72 

Firdusi, the Homer of Persia 73 

Family traditions perpetuated especially by woman 74 

Conjugal love, mothers 75 

The heroines of Firdusi 76 

Life and misfortune of Firdusi 77-8o 

CHAPTER III. 

GREECE. 

The intimate relation between India, Persia, and Greece 82 

Greece saved the world at Salamis, and raised it up at the Renaissance 83 

Education S^ 

The true genius of Greece is transformation 83 

Terra-Mater. — Mother Earth. — Ceres 84 

The holy Pelasgian Mystery, the Spirit of the Earth 87 

Horror of the effusion of blood. — Hindoo-like Grecian manners 87 

The Maternal Passion 89 

The ideal of a mother worthy of adoration 90 

Festival of flowers. — Festival of laws . 95, 96 

Ceres creates the Commonwealth, and teaches Immortality 96, 97 

The vanity of the Ionic gods 98 

The strength of the human family 98 

Greece has no organized sacerdotal order 99 

Rank of the gods— Fire, Earth, Water, Air 101 

The gods grow from myth to myth 101, 105 

Life of Greece— lofty, brilliant, and pure 106 



Table of Contents. vii 

PAGE 

Similarity of domestic life in Greece and Persia 107 

Woman equal with man 108 

Invention of the Municipality 109 

Homer's Iliad no 

The Odyssey m 

War a purely gymnastic exercise ; no slaves in, 112 

Dorian invasion 112 

Lacedaemon n^ 

Destiny — Moria — Nemesis 114, 115 

Prometheus the savior of the Municipality 115 

Education. — The child. — Hermes 117 

Athens fashions at once the citizen, the hero, the man 1 18, 1 19 

Education of liberty, energy, happiness 120 

Hermes, the amiable god of the public schools 121 

The Panathenrca 123 

Homer's poems are wholesome food for nourishing, refining, and renewing 

the heart 123 

The perfection of the Greek language 124 

Apollo. — Light. — Harmony 125 

Delphi. — Its elysium of statues 126 

How Apollo was humanized, deified 128 

The games at Delphi 1 30 

War of the lyre against the Phrygian flute 131 

Amphictyons 132 

Supreme harmony of Greece in Apollo 133, 134 

Hercules 134 

Bacchus 135 

Spartan girls 136 

Hercules was for the lyre against the flute and Bacchus 137 

Hercules, the workman, by labor transforms the earth 138 

How much this myth is superior to the Homeric poems 139 

Hercules a bastard, a cadet, a slave. — The victim and the benefactor of 

the world 140 

He strangles hydras and lions, and gives peace to Greece by subduing 

brigands and rivers 142 

He establishes throughout the world the duty of hospitality 143 

Jealousy of the gods 145 

Bacchus arms the Centaurs against Hercules 146 

The king Admetus 147 

Hercules is compelled to go to the infernal regions, from which he brings 

back Alkestis 148 

His involuntary crimes 149 

His death 150 

He bequeathed an active and heroic type of Passion 151 

Prometheus 152 



viii Table of Contents, 



PAGE 

^Eschylus a soldier, a censor, and a prophet 152 

His hundred tragedies 153 

Michael Angelo and ^Eschylus 153 

^Eschylus, in the very midst of the supreme glory of Athens, was filled 

with forebodings. 154 

The new art 155 

Pheidias 156 

Winckelman , 156 

Euripides and Sophocles 157 

Reign of Bacchus 158, 159 

Shakespeare and iEschylus 161 

yEschylus against the young gods, and the impending tyranny 162 

Slaves and women at the Athenian theatres 163 

The Areopagus 164 

-^Eschylus evokes the Liberator, namely Prometheus, the son of yus- 

tice 165, 167 

The Prometheus is not obscure 168 

Living liberty is paramount in ^Eschylus' dramas 170 

Prometheus is the true prophet of the Stoic and the Jurisconsult 170 

Death of ^Eschylus . . 171 

Greece perished neither by war, nor slavery, nor corrupt personal morality, 
but by the decay of social morality, the loneliness of woman — 
Sappho for instance, and by the enervating invasion of the gods of 
the East 172-178 



|3ctrt Secontr. 

CHILDREN OF THE TWILIGHT, OF THE NIGHT, 

AND OF THE LIGHT REFLECTING AGAINST 

THE DARKNESS. 

CHAPTER I. 

EGYPT. — DEATH. 

PAGB 

Egypt, an immense mortuary monument. — the river of life 179, 180 

Egypt, a grand harmony, which has been copied by all nations 181 

Goodness of Isis. — The family at the altar 182, 183 

Osiris 184, 185 

Death of Osiris. — Grief of Isis. — A true and ever-recurring history 186 

Love stronger than death. — Osiris resuscitated for Isis's sake. 187 

Exclusive, individual love, which clings to the remains of the beloved one 187 



Table of Contents. ix. 

PAGE 

Isis adopts and suckles Anubis, the ferocious murderer of her husband 188 
Anubis creates the arts. — He welcomes, reassures, and guides the soul at 

the moment it leaves the body 189 

The lot of the Egyptian — Incessant toil 190, 191 

The Pyramids 191 

Rameses 191 

Egyptian symbolism : 192 

The god Thoth 192 

The Middle Ages have narrowed and perverted the mind.. . . 193 

The Egyptian's dread of evil spirits 193, 194 

The tree moans and weeps. — The Egyptian trusts it with his heart 195 

Legend of the living tree 196 

Satou's history. — A novel of the time of Moses 196 



CHAPTER II. 

SYRIA. — PHRYGIA. — ENERVATION. 

The Syrians, Assyrians, and Arabians in Egyptian paintings 198 

The ideal of Syria — the female fish 199 

Astarte and Moloch ; prostitution, mutilation 200 

Parthenogenesis 201 

Semiramis, Lot, and Myrrha. — The legend of incest 201 

Burials at all times have been the occasion of the saddest follies 202 

Birth and death of Adonis 203 

The gardens of Adonis 204 

Resurrection of Adonis 204 

Extraordinary influence of Adonis; disappearance of manhood 205 

Hospitality of Babylon 206-208 

The v\o\-Mother 209 

The priests of Mylitta ; her popes ; her mendicants, who were the Ca- 
puchins of antiquity 209-211 



CHAPTER III. 

BACCHUS-SABAZIUS. — HIS INCARNATION. — THE TYRANT. 

Invasion of the Eastern gods 212 

The lascivious Baalpeor of Syria 213 

Bacchus Zagreus and his Passion 214, 215 

He enters Eleusis and becomes a mediator 215, 216 

Plato's mediator of love 216 

Bacchus, a conqueror ; the god of tyrants and of slaves 219 

Feminine and Bacchanalian orgies 220, 221 



Table of Contents. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE INCARNATION OF SABAZIUS. — MILITARY ORGIES. 

PAGE 

Philip, king of Macedon 222 

Albania 223 

Olympias pretends to have conceived Alexander the Great by the serpent 

Sabazius 224 

The appearance and character of Alexander were of a barbarian 225 

Alexander's expedition had been planned before he was born 226-228 

He imitates Achilles 230 

He demands divine honors 230, 231 

Resistance of Callisthenes 232 

Alexander's return from India ; the orgies of the new Bacchus. . . . 232, 233 

Alexander's heritage 234, 235 

The magians organize the monarchical ceremony, which has since been 

imitated 235, 236 

CHAPTER V. 

THE JEW. — THE SERVANT. 

The Jewish Bible 237 

Judea, Syria, Phoenicia, and Carthage 238 

The Jew invited and hospitably admitted the stranger 240 

Character of the Jew. — He is a peace-loving man, and a man of business 241 

His is the glory of having immortalized the sighs of the slave 242, 243 

The songs of night 243 

The Book of Job J 244 

The spirit of the desert 245 

Jehovah 246 

The two religions of the Bible. — Elohim and Jehovah 246, 247 

Efforts of the prophets to purify these two worships 247, 248 

The Jew believes that he is the chosen of God, and that God will for- 
give him everything 249, 250 

The manly appearance of the Law hides the feminine tenet of Grace. . . . 250 
Jeremiah and Ezekiel deny the justice of visiting the iniquity of the 

fathers upon the children 251, 252 

The Jews in Chaldea. — Maxims of craft and selfishness 252, 253 

Esdras. — The Great Synagogue 253 

Impossible massacres related in the Bible 254 

Various merits of the Jew. — He is the best slave ; he rises through the 

feeling of his inward liberty (note) 254, 255 

The Pharisees 255 

The Word 256 

Worship of the alphabet strangely mingled with mysticism 257 

The Schoolmen and the Rabbis 257, 258 



Table of Contents. xi 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE WORLD-WOMAN. 

PAGE 

The Song of Songs 259-261 

Its character of Syrian passion, and of Jewish eagerness and delicacy 261, 262 
Omnipotence of the young woman possessed with the seven spirits 263-268 

The Syrian woman fit for business as well as pleasure 268, 269 

Timid prudence of man. — General enervation 270 

Apparition of the Novel.— Jewish novels 270, 271 

Esther (the Book of) embodies the general history of Jewish, Syrian, 

Graeco-Phcenician women scattered at that time everywhere. . . 272, 273 

They were hired and sold 273, 274 

Their affection for the gods of the East 274 

Roman ladies 274, 275 

The gods of death invade Rome 275 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN WOMAN AND THE STOIC : LAW AND GRACE. 

The old Italian genius. — Destruction of Carthage. 277 

Lucretius and Virgil 278 

Rome and Greece 279 

Diogenes 280 

Glorification of labor 280, 281 

Stoicism. — Scope of jurisprudence 281-283 

Jurisprudence found the world used up and enervated 283-288 

Philo, the contemporary of Jesus 289 

CHAPTER VIII. 

TRIUMPH OF WOMAN. 

Christianity born of Mary 291 

Woman was a priest till the year 369 291 

How Jesus was born of Mary 292 

The gospel of Mary is the first of all gospels 293, 294 

Contest between the Temple and the Synagogue. — The Rabbi 295, 296 

Jesus taught nothing but himself 296 

Three women began the legend 297 

Life of Mary according to the primitive gospel 298-300 

The women who surrounded Jesus. — The Magdalene 301 

The women who surrounded Saint Paul. — Thekla, Lydia, Chloe, Phoe- 
be 302-304 

Epistle to the Romans. — The Marseilles Hymn of the Gospel of 

Grace 305, 306 



xii Table of Contents, 

PAGE 

Phoebe carries it to Rome, to Nero's household 306, 307 

Doctrine of absolute obedience 308 

Double character of Nero 308 

Struggle of Phoebe against the Stoic and the Jurists 309, 310 

Power of woman as a priestess during four hundred years 311, 312 



CHAPTER IX. 

PERIOD OF UNIVERSAL WEAKNESS. — MIDDLE AGES. , J 

Expectation of death. — Inertia 313, 314 

The empire open to the barbarians 315, 316 

The empire opposes Mithras to Jesus 317, 318 

Literary enervation. — Hermas 318,- 319 

Hatred of nature 321 

Disparagement of the head of the family 321, 322 

The Gospel of the Carpenter 322-324 

iPredestination and pre-eternal damnation — Middle Ages. 325-328 



CONCLUSION. 

No more criticism of the Middle Ages, but for the present let us forget 

them 3 2 9-33l 

We must march toward the future and imbibe the human sense 330 

The deep Faith is established. — Science and Conscience have embraced 

each other 331 

How to fortify one's self in the new path 332 



LIFE AND WORKS OF MICHELET. 



JULES MlCHELET, the celebrated French historian, was 
born at Paris, on the 2 1st of August, 1798. His father 
was a printer, and had his printing-office in the chapel of 
an abandoned monastery. One of his uncles, Narcissus 
Michelet, was in 1867 the oldest typographer. The early 
youth of the future historian was full of hardships : he had 
to struggle against the straitened circumstances that had 
fallen upon his family, already half ruined under the Con- 
sulate. He became a compositor in order to aid his 
father, while at the same time he began, in the best way 
he could, his literary studies, under the guidance of an old 
bookseller, who had formerly been a schoolmaster. It was 
proposed to his father to obtain work for the young man 
at the Imperial printing-office ; but Michelet's father re- 
fused, and devoted his last resources to educate his son 
at the Lyceum of Charlemag?ie. Young Michelet made 
gratifying progress under the tuition of Villemain and 
Victor Leclerc, and was chosen an assistant to a professor 
of the University, after a brilliant competition (1821), and 
was afterward elected to the professorship of history at 
Rollin College, where he taught till 1826. 

His first works : Chronological Table of Modern History 
(1825), Sync/ironical Table of Modern History (1827), 
though they are only elementary, show the tendencies of 
the historian, and establish his place in the school which 
regards history first of all as a course of philosophical 
training. Michelet, in 1827, was appointed Master of the 
debating society at the Normal School. He declared his 
views more emphatically in his Introduction to Universal 



xiv Life and Works of Michelet. 

History (1831), in his translation of the Selected Works of 
Vico (1835), in his Roman History, The Republic (1839), 
and especially in his Origin of French Law (1837). This 
last work shows him to be master of the subject, endowed 
with rare faculties and possessed with vast knowledge. 
The Origin of French Law, written in a sober, concise, 
and vigorous style — which was his first manner of writing 
— pointed out what interest it is possible to give to appar- 
ently the driest subjects, and what glimpses of light may 
be thrown upon the obscurest chaos of ancient institu- 
tions. All the past is, as it were, revivified in his pages, 
which are full of inspiration. 

After the revolution of 1830, his professors, Villemain 
and Guizot, having been raised to power, Michelet was 
appointed Chief of the Historical Section at the record- 
offices, and afterward Assistant Professor of the course of 
history by Guizot at the Faculty of Letters. In 1838 he 
succeeded Daunau in the Professorship of History and 
Morals at the College of France, and began his celebrated 
lectures, to which the younger students eagerly flocked. 
This professorship was the foremost platform for the ad- 
vocacy of democratic ideas, and the vivacity with which 
Michelet attacked the Jesuits, and denounced their under- 
hand practices and encroachments, contributed not a little 
to win for him the most lively sympathies. Three great 
books were the result of this teaching. They are the sum- 
ming up of it under different points of view : The Jesuits, 
written conjointly with Edgar Quinet (1843) \ Priests, 
Women and Families (1844), The People (1845). The 
clergy were powerful enough to silence the professor. 
The lectures were suspended, and Michelet's public career 
was momentarily broken. The revolution of 1848 was at 
hand, and, after the events of February, the choice was 
given Michelet to be reinstated in his professorship. He 
declined, and even refused an election as Representative 
(which honor was offered him), in order that he might 
devote himself exclusively to study. 



Life and Works of Michelet. xv 

Michelet, in 1833, first laid the corner-stone of the 
great memorial, to which he consecrated the best part of 
his life — I mean his History of France (1 833-1 867). This 
work, often interrupted by other undertakings, taken up 
again heartily, conceived at first on a comprehensive plan, 
and in its continuation dealt with in large episodic pieces 
— which are only connected together by the thread of 
facts, so as to exhibit the culminant point of each epoch 
— this work, I say, contains the entire writer and thinker, 
with various modifications which his manner of judging 
and his style have undergone. 

The first six volumes (1 833-1 846) are a model of be- 
witching narrative ; facts are interwoven, deducted, and 
set off with that magic style of which Michelet is the 
supreme master. The geographic description of France, 
at the beginning of the second volume, is a masterpiece. 
Geography — an arid science — becomes in his hands as in- 
teresting as a masterly painting ; the enumeration of re- 
gions, of bays, of rivers, of mountains, is transformed into 
a succession of charming and magnificent landscapes. 

As to events and persons, Michelet gives to history a 
new form. " Augustin Thierry," he says, " has styled his- 
tory a narrative ; Guizot defines it an analysis, and I call 
it a resurrection." Men, facts, manners — everything, 
indeed, revives under his hand, the smallest details of 
character or costumes are studied thoroughly, though 
often sketched at one bold stroke ; and carry the reader 
into the very scene where those personages acted, and 
make him live in their life and share their passions. 
Michelet first of all touches the heart : his way of con- 
vincing is by the emotions. The painstaking annalist 
lays open before the reader the facts, places in juxtapo- 
sition the testimony, compares one view with another, 
and gives a clue that enables him to distinguish truth 
from falsehood. Michelet, on the contrary, keeps the 
hard work to himself alone. When he has once compre- 
hended a fact and a personage, he throws upon them 



xvi Life and Works of Michelet. 

a vivid gleam of the same light in which he saw things 
and men in his fervent imagination and ever-quick sen- 
sibility. 

Notwithstanding the success Michelet had obtained in 
the first part of his History of France , he interrupted it 
when he reached the reign of Louis XL He left it alone 
for so long a time that people thought that he would 
never finish it — for he let himself be led away by other 
works capable in themselves of absorbing the activity of 
a life-time. The first of these intervening works I refer 
to was the History of the French Revolution (1847- 
1853, 7 vols, in 8vo.). The great epopee of the revolution 
had then for the first time a poet worthy of it. Lamartine, 
in his Girondins y had only written an episode of it, with 
insufficient historical research, and the book of Thiers, 
though remarkable from several points of view, was far 
from giving the proper conspicuousness to the characters 
of that unique era. Louis Blanc has afterwards more 
carefully analyzed the same facts and the same char- 
acters, throwing on them new light ; but although the 
divergencies of opinion occasioned many sharp polemics 
between the two historians, and although Louis Blanc has 
pointed out several inaccuracies in Michelet's work, yet 
the latter continues to be a powerful, sincere history ; it 
has cleared the ground which a partisan spirit had ob- 
structed with absurd legends, and above all things it 
vibrates with a communicative emotion. 

After this great effort Michelet wrote some works of 
lesser importance : Democratic Legends of the North 
(1854), a series of studies on Poland and Russia ; the Pro- 
secution of the Templars — a simple collection of the Latin 
manuscript documents of that mysterious affair — (1 85 1 , 2 
vols.). Michelet had published the first volume of it in 
1841, and had promised to elucidate the second with an 
introduction ; but he did not keep his word, although ten 
years elapsed before publishing the second volume. He 
doubtless thought that he had not yet examined deeply 



Life and Works of Michelet. xvii 

enough into that mystery. He then again took up his 
History of France. The second part was issued without 
interruption in twelve years (185 5-1 867), under different 
titles : Renaissance ; Reformation ; Wars of Religion ; 
The League and Henry IV. ; Henry IV. and Richelieu ; 
Richelieu and the Fronde ; Louis XIV. and the Revoca- 
tion of the Edict of Nantes ; Louis XIV. and t 'he Duke 
of Burgundy ; The Regence / Louis XV.; Louis XV. 
and Louis XVI. Although these volumes exhibit the 
sequel of history without a break of continuity, their 
very manner of publication and their titles show the 
method of the writer, who, taking hold of a culminant 
point of an epoch, or rather considering its predominant 
physiognomy, works around it until he makes every part 
luminous. In this way he embodies the whole Renais- 
sance in Michael Angelo, as he had embodied the whole 
French Revolution in Danton. To this second part of his 
history, rather than to the first, must be applied the word 
'* resurrection." " Men and facts are so vividly pictured 
in his inflamed imagination," H. Taine says, " that the 
writer at last believes them to be real ; he views them 
alive, he speaks to them, and hears their answers ; the 
dialogue and the drama are brought into history on every 
side. The circumscribed frame of the narrative is broken ; 
apostrophes, exclamations, dithyrambs, curses, personal 
confidences throng together ; history becomes a poem, 
and even when he keeps within the limits of a pure narra- 
tive, his vivid imagination is not slackened. The images 
are so lively, the manner so rapid, the quick invention so 
happy and so wild that the objects appear to be born 
again with all their colors, motions, and forms, and pass 
before our eyes as a phantasmagoria of luminous pictures. 
The flame of his imagination animates his style, and ele- 
vates it even to passion. Michelet writes as Delacroix 
paints, venturing on the harshest tones, searching in the 
slums for passionate expressions, borrowing, from medicine 
and the popular idioms, details and words which strike and 



xviii Life and Works of Michelet. 

frighten, and clothing the whole with splendid metaphors, 
which put a purple tinge on all the stains he has unveiled." 
Michelet, on account of his sensibility, possesses above 
all the faculty of suffering and rejoicing in contact with 
the past, and he communicates full well this emotion to 
the reader. Under his guidance there is no more analysis, 
no more doubt, no more circumspection ; the reader is 
led on. Some critics have wished to oppose this manner 
— to them very strange — of writing history. Indeed his 
method disturbs positive minds that like to place their 
foot deliberately and only on solid ground ; they have 
asked themselves if they had to believe those inductions, 
those hypotheses, those physiological analyses which are 
so new, and those portraits outlined at two strokes of a 
pencil, those characters conjectured from a phrase of a 
chronicler, a portrait or an engraving ; those conclusions 
which disconcert, those insights which had escaped all 
other historians, and which all at once set at naught every 
received opinion. There is, indeed, something con- 
fusing in this kind of divining of the historian. H. 
Taine says : "Must we believe Michelet? As forme, 
after making the experiment, I say, Yes. In studying the 
records of an epoch which he has studied, one feels a 
sensation like his, and finds, after all, that his conclusions 
of divinatory lyricism are nearly as exact as those of the 
painstaking analysis and slow generalization. But this 
verification has power only with those who have made 
it, and so far only as they have gone." 

The mannerism of Michelet has, in his last works, 
undergone a new transformation ; a decided feminine in- 
fluence is felt in it. Having failed to find in his first mar- 
riage all the happiness of which his tender soul dreamed, 
he had some years afterwards formed a purely intellectual 
connection with a young French school-teacher (Miss 
Mialaret, daughter of Toussaint Louverture's secretary), 
who was engaged in the remotest part of Poland as a 
governess. Having become a widower, he married her, 



Life and Works of Michelet. xix 

and after this second marriage, the books of the illustrious 
historian seem to have been written under the influence 
of an uninterrupted honey-moon. We are indebted to 
this influence for The Women of the Revolution (1854) — a 
work containing detached sketches of his great history ; 
The Bird '(1856); The Insect (1853) ; Love(i$$9); Woman 
(i860); The Sea (1861). Each of these books is some- 
what peculiar, and full of an exaltation which is at times 
unhealthy, but the magic of their style is matchless. 

On the whole, Michelet always held fast to his system 
of psychological studies, and carried into science, phys- 
iology and natural history, the same method he had 
formerly applied to history. He sought after the soul of 
birds as he had previously done for the soul of facts ; 
relating their sufferings with the same emotion with which 
he had unfolded those of the people. 

His Bible of Humanity is a large epic in prose. The 
artist-historian, in the manner of inspired men and proph- 
ets, sings the evolution of mankind. There is no doubt 
that he throws brilliant glimpses of light on the long 
course of events and periods which he unfolds; but at the 
same time he carries away the reader with such rapid 
flights of imagination, as almost to make him giddy. 

At length Michelet again took up his great history. In 
uniting, through the volume of Louis XVI. , his History of 
France to his History of the French Revolution , he had 
run the whole cycle of French annals, as he had at first 
outlined it in his mind. He wished to continue his work 
up to our own time, and so began the History of the 
XlXth Century, of which only a few volumes have been 
published (1872-1873, 3 vols, in 8vo.). The title of the 
first volume is The Directory, Origin of the Bonapartes / 
the two other volumes deal with the Consulate, and the 
first part of the Empire. 

The personality of Michelet stands forth pre-eminently 
in the works he wrote in his old age ; his style is as pic- 
turesque and brilliant as ever, and his manner is as origi- 



xx Life and Works of Michelet. 

nal. Some of his faults as a writer, however, are more 
prominent, and the boldness of his statements, as well as 
the fierce onslaught upon acquired beliefs, cannot fail to 
offend many a reader. 

Even after what Lanfrey had written on Napoleon, 
Michelet has been able to show the world a Bonaparte 
still unknown, by exhibiting the uncle through the nephew. 
Never was a hero so completely overthrown. 

Michelet is one of the most sympathetic characters of 
our time. Standing aloof from parties, for he has never 
followed any into the arena of active politics, he is never- 
theless one of the bravest champions of democracy. He 
has accomplished more for it than if he had served it in 
the world of political life, since he has served it so well in 
the field of thought, by unfolding its history and giving 
due prominency to the legitimacy of its aspirations. At 
the time of the second empire he sided with the moderate 
opposition, but his warfare was always bitter, such as his- 
tory itself wages against despotism ; he applied to that 
time the same divinatory proceedings which he so well 
made use of in such a masterly way as to the past ; and 
seeing clearly the approaching end of that detested gov- 
ernment, he entreated active men to become organized in 
advance, and think of what they ought to do on the mor- 
row of its falling to pieces. His letter of August, 1869 — 
a year before the overthrow of the second, empire — is the 
voice of a prophet. He was an implacable adversary of 
the war of 1870, and he immediately published at Flor- 
ence (where he was at that time) a patriotic appeal to the 
brotherhood of nations, which cannot be understood. 
The title of this book is France before Europe (1870). 
(Pierre Larousse's Large Universal Dictionary, 1874.) 

Besides the works above mentioned, Michelet wrote The 
Memoirs of Luther (1835)/ The Sorceress (1862)/ The 
Mountain; and Our Children (1869)— a plea for compul- 
sory education. His green old age gave hope that he might 
write several good books yet, or at least finish his History 



Life and Works of Michelet. xxi 

of the XlXtJi Century, which would have been the crown- 
ing of the edifice. But it was not to be, and although his 
energy never failed, his heart-disease gained ground day 
by day. He died on the Isle of Hyeres on the 9th of 
February, 1874, and was buried in its little cemetery, but 
after a short time his remains were transferred to Paris. 

Michelet was a great historian and put his heart in what he 
wrote. He was also a thoroughly upright man, and inured 
to the buffets of fortune. What he wrote about himself, 
in an address to his readers prefixed to the first volume of 
his last work {History of the XlXth Century), gives the 
best idea of the man and his works. Here are his immor- 
tal words : " I manifested my sympathies for Germany, and 
in general for all Europe, at the College of France. I was 
there surrounded by those young men who liked me, and 
I spread there the Round Table, to which all nations, 
asking of me the food of life, came and sat down. As 
long as Ccesar ruled I did not think of returning there, 
but I devoted myself to complete the memorial I owed 
to France." 

When, after the fall of Napoleon III., he claimed his 
professorship, not so much on his own account as for the 
honor of the College of France, the professors of which 
hold their positions for life, according to its charter, and 
also according to the decisions of many a Secretary of 
State, Jules Simon, then Minister of Education, answered 
him that the place was regularly occupied by another 
incumbent. But such was not the case, and Michelet ex- 
posed the true state of things. 

His books for public instruction, and even his Abridg- 
ment of Modern History, were proscribed, notwithstand- 
ing that they had been previously approved by the Uni- 
versity. Michelet, in speaking of this injustice toward him, 
says : " So much do they fear even the impartial books 
which ought to take the place of those employed under 
the empire. But it is not a complaint I am making. I 
was suspended in 1847 by the Ministry of Guizot; I was 



xxii Life and Works of Michelet. 

expelled from my professorship, without pension or com- 
pensation, after the coup d'etat of the 2d of December, 
1 85 1 ; the Communists set my house on fire, and the Ver- 
sailles Government turned me out again from my profes- 
sorship. But I make no complaint. I have had all I 
wanted. Rulers and parties have agreed to reward me, 
by publishing, in the best way that they were able, that I 
am an independent man. I have deserved such a testi- 
monial. I never forsook my principles. Though I am 
deprived of my professor's chair, yet I have my platform. 
It is of sufficient height. I can survey from it the tem- 
pests, the winds of revolutions, by which the world is now 
being shaken and overturned. The last judgment is there 
— the final conviction, the sentence, the great sword 
about to fall on the neck of kings and of nations — the 
revolutions themselves ! " 



PREFACE. 



Mankind have incessantly deposited their thoughts in a com- 
mon Bible. Every great people writes there its peculiar records. 

These records are very clear, but different in form, and in a 
very free handwriting ; here in the form of great poems and his- 
torical accounts ; there in the form of pyramids and statues. A 
god sometimes, or a city, express much more than books, and, 
without a word uttered, they express the very soul. Hercules 
is a verse. Athens is a poem as much and more than the Iliad, 
and the high genius of Greece is entirely in Pallas. 

It happens frequently that they have forgotten to write the 
most profound verse, the life which they lived, through which 
they acted, and in which they breathed. Who aspires to say, 
" My heart has beaten to-day ? " They acted like heroes. It is 
our duty to write their life, to find out their soul, their magnani- 
mous heart, which the coming generations will feed upon. 

Our century is a happy one. Through the electric telegraph 
it tunes the soul of the earth united in its present. By the means 
of history and the concordance of times, it gives the world a fra- 
ternal feeling, and the joy of knowing that the past and the 
present life is at one, of the same spirit. 

All this is new and of this century. The means were wanting 
till now. These means — sciences, languages, travels, discoveries 
of every kind — culminated in the present all together. All at 
once what was impossible has become easy. We have been 
enabled to pierce through the abyss of space and time, and see 
skies beyond the skies, and stars beyond the stars. On the 
other hand, from century to century, going always backward, we 
have become acquainted with the prodigious antiquity of Egypt 
in its dynasties, of India in its gods and its successive and super- 
posed languages. 

This enlargement, in which we might have expected to meet 
with more discrepancy, has, on the contrary, led to more and 



xxiv Preface. 

more harmony. The stars, the very metallic composition of 
which has been revealed to us by the spectrum, seem to differ 
little from our earth and solar system. The historical ages, 
to which languages have enabled us to reascend, differ very 
little from modern times in the great moral things. Especially 
in the home and the affections of the heart, as in the elementary 
ideas of labor, of right, and of justice, the remotest antiquity is 
repeated in us. The primeval India of the Vedas, the Iran of the 
Avesta, which might be called the Dawn of the World, are by 
far nearer to us, in the so strong, so simple, so affective types 
they have left us of the family and creative labor, than the 
sterility and asceticism of the Middle Ages. 

There are no negations in this book of mine. It is but the 
living thread, the universal woof which our forefathers have 
woven with their thoughts and their hearts. We are continuing 
it in a way unknown to us, and our soul to-morrow will be there. 
It is not, as it could be imagined, a history of religions. Such a 
history cannot be isolated and written separately. This book 
passes altogether over classifications. The general thread of the 
life which man pursues is woven with twenty united threads which 
cannot be isolated but by tearing them down. The links of love, 
of family, of right, of art, of industry, are incessantly mingled 
with that of religion. Moral activity includes religion, but is not 
included in it. Religion is a cause, but it is much more an effect. 
It is frequently an arena where true life is acted. Frequently 
it is a vehicle, an instrument of active energies. 

When faith creates the heart, it is because the heart itself has 
already created faith. 

My book originates in broad sunlight, among our forefathers, 
the sons of light, the Aryas, Indians, Persians, Greeks, of whom 
the Romans, Celtes, and Germans have been inferior branches.* 

* This book is infinitely simple. A first attempt of this kind must con- 
tain only what is very clear, and pass over, ist, phases of savage life ; 2d, 
the semi-civilized world, China, etc. ; 3d, the nations which have left little 
record and the age of which is yet in discussion ; 4th, the abstract doctrines, 
which have never been popular, even among enlightened societies. Philoso- 
phers are much spoken of, but their books, even in Greece, were little read. 
With great pertinency Aristotle laughed at that foolish Alexander, who com- 
plained that his Metaphysics had been published. It remained as it had been 
unedited, and was for a very long time forgotten. 



Preface. xxv 

Their high genius consists in having from the very first created 
the type of things essential and vital to humanity. 

The primeval India of the Vedas gives us the family in that 
natural purity and incomparable nobleness which no age lias 
surpassed. 

Persia gives us the lesson of heroic labor, in that greatness, 
strength, and creative virtue which our own century, though 
powerful, might envy. 

Greece, besides her arts, possessed the greatest of them all, 
the art of making man. Wonderful power, enormously fruitful, 
which lords it over, and sets at nought all that has been done 
afterward. 

If man had not had betimes these three causes of life — breath- 
ing, circulation, and assimilation — he certainly could not have 
subsisted. 

If, from the most ancient time, man had not possessed his 
great social instruments — home, labor, education — he could not 
have endured. Society, and even the individual, would have 
perished. 

Therefore its natural types have existed betimes and in a 
wonderful and incomparable beauty. 

Here we have purity, strength, light, innocence. The whole 
is infancy, but there is nothing greater than this. 

Come, girls and boys, take boldly the Bibles of light. Every- 
thing is there wholesome and very pure. 

The purest of those Bibles, the Avesta, is a ray of sunshine. 

Homer, Aeschylus, together with the great heroic myths, are 
full of young life — the vigorous sap of March, the effulgent azure 
of April. 

The dawn is in the Vedas. In the Rdmaya?ia — excepting five 
or six pages of silly, modern interpolation — there is a delightful 
evening, where all the infancies, the maternities of Nature, 
spirits, flowers, trees, and beasts sport together and bewitch the 
heart. 

The gloomy genius of the south, through Memphis, Carthage, 
Tyre, and Judea, quite naturally contrasted, and set itself against 
the Trinity of light. Egpyt in its monuments, Judea in its 
Scriptures, have written down their Bibles, which are gloomy and 
of profound meaning. 



xxvi Preface. 

The sons of light had opened life gloriously and made it fruit- 
ful. But the sons of Egypt and Judea walked in death. Death 
and love commingled together work deeply in the worships of 
Syria, which have been diffused everywhere. 

This group of nations is undoubtedly the secondary side, the 
small half of mankind. Their influence, however, has been great 
through commerce and the art of writing, through Carthage and 
Phoenicia, through the Arabian conquest, and still more through 
the strange conquest which the Jewish Bible has made of so 
many nations. 

This venerated book, in which mankind long sought their re- 
ligious life, is valuable for historical information rather than for 
edification. It bears evidently, as might be expected, the marks 
of many centuries of the different conditions of the Jewish 
nation, as well as of the various states of mind that inspired it. 
It is assumed to be dogmatic ; but it cannot be so, because it is 
very incoherent. The religious and moral principle fluctuates 
infinitely from Elohim to Jehova. The fatal effects of the fall, 
the arbitrary election, etc., which are to be found in it on every 
page, are in violent disagreement with the beautiful chapters of 
Jeremiah and Ezekiel, who promulgated the Right as we under- 
stand it at the present time. In its morality there is the same 
discord. To be sure, the great heart of Isaiah is far, very far 
from the equivocal skill, and the petty prudence of the so-called 
books of Solomon. The Bible is strong for and against polygamy 
and slavery. 

The variety and the elasticity of this book has been neverthe- 
less of much use, when the father of a family — a severe Israelite 
or a staunch Protestant— read certain chosen fragments and 
expounded them to his family, pervading them with an inspi- 
ration which is not always in the text. Who would put this 
text in the hands of a boy ? What woman, without casting her 
eyes down, will dare say she has read it throughout ? It often 
presents all at once the unveiled impurity of Syria, and many a 
time the exquisitely calculated and relished sensuality of gloomy 
and subtle minds which have gone through everything. 

The day in which our kindred Bibles have appeared in the 
literary world, it has been better observed how much the Jewish 
Bible belongs to another race. It has a value which will always 



Preface. xxvii 

remain ; but it is dark and full of cumbrous ambiguity — beautiful 
but unsafe, like the night. 

Jerusalem cannot remain, as in the ancient maps, just in the 
midst — an immense point between Europe, scarcely visible, and 
Asia Minor — eclipsing all the world beside. 

Humanity cannot sit down forever in that landscape of ashes 
to admire the trees " which formerly may have been there." Hu- 
manity cannot stay like the thirsty camel, that, after a day of 
travelling, they lead to a dry torrent, and say, " Drink, camel, 
this has been a stream. If you wish to have a sea, hard by there 
is the Dead Sea, and on its shores there are salt and pebbles for 
pasturage." 

Coming back from the immense shades of India and the 
R&mayana, returning from the Tree of Life, where the Avesta, 
the Shah-Nameh presented me four rivers, the waters of Para- 
dise, — here, I confess, that I am thirsty. I appreciate the desert ; 
I appreciate Nazareth and the small lakes of Galilea. But, 
to speak frankly, I am thirsty. I could drink them off at a 
draught. 

Allow rather, allow that mankind, free in their greatness, may 
go everywhere. Let them drink where their forefathers drank. 
With their enormous works, their task extended in every direc- 
tion, their wants of Titan, they have need of much air, much 
water, and much sky ; nay, the whole sky, all space and light. 
the infinity of horizons — the earth for promised land, and the 
world for Jerusalem. 

October 16, 1864. 



Part first 



THE CHILDREN OF THE SUN. 
:o: 

CHAPTER I. 

INDIA. 

The Rdmayana. 

The year 1863 will always be to me dear and blessed, 
for in it I was privileged to read, for the first time, the 
great sacred poem of India — the divine Ramayana. 

11 When this poem was first sung, Brahma himself was 
ravished with it. Gods, geniuses — all beings, from birds 
to serpents — men and holy anchorites— exclaimed : 'Oh, 
the sweet poem which we would always gladly hear ! 
Oh, enrapturing song ! How it imitates nature ! How 
clearly we see this long history ! It lives under our very 
eyes." 

"Happy he who reads this book entire! Happy he 
who has read but the half of it ! It makes the Brahman 
wise, the soldier brave, the merchant rich. If, by chance, 
a slave (Pariah) hears it, he becomes ennobled. He who 
reads the Rdmayana is absolved from all his sins." 

This last expression is no delusion of the fancy. This 
great stream of poetry sweeps away our abiding sin ; the 
dregs, the bitter leaven, which time brings and leaves in us, 
it washes away, and thus makes us pure. Whoever feels 
his heart dry, let him drink of the Rdmayana. Whoever 
has lost what was dear to him, and is plunged in sorrow, 
let him draw from it the sweet comforts and sympathies 



2 Bible of Humanity, 

of nature. Whoever has labored too much and wished 
too much, let him drink from this cup a deep draught of 
life and youth. 

Man cannot always work. Every year he must rest, 
take breath, and renew himself at the great living springs 
which preserve their eternal freshness. But where are 
these to be found except at the cradle of our race — on the 
sacred summits whence descend on one side the Indus and 
the Ganges, and on the other the torrents of Persia, the 
rivers of Paradise ? 

Everything is narrow in the West. Greece is so small 
that I am stifled in it ; Judea is so dry that I pant in it. 
Let me glance at the side of high Asia, towards the deep 
Orient. There I have my immense poem, as vast as the 
Indian Sea, blessed and adorned by the sun — a book of 
divine harmony, where nothing jars. A calm peace per- 
vades it, and even in the midst of the battles described in 
it, we perceive an infinite sweetness, a boundless brother- 
hood, which extends to every living thing ; an ocean with- 
out bottom or shore, full of love, pity, and clemency. I 
have found that for which I was looking — the Bible of 
goodness. Receive me then, great poem ! Let me plunge 
in thee, O sea of milk ! 

It is only quite recently that the whole of this poem has 
been translated. It had always been judged by an iso- 
lated part or an interpolated episode directly contrary to 
its general spirit. Now that it has appeared in all its 
truth and grandeur, it is easy to see that, whoever was its 
last compiler, it is the outgrowth of India — the product of 
its ages. During perhaps two thousand years the Hindoos 
gave utterance to the Ram ay ana in the different songs and 
recitals which constitute this epic ; and for the last two 
thousand years they have enacted it in the popular dramas, 
which were, and are still represented at the great national 
festivals. 

It is not a mere poem. It is a kind of Bible which, 
with the sacred traditions, contains nature, society, the 



India. 3 

arts, the Indian scenery, vegetation, animals, and the 
changes of the year in the peculiar enchantments of the 
different seasons. We cannot judge such a book as we 
would of the Iliad. It has never undergone those expur- 
gations and corrections to which the Homeric poems have 
been subjected by the great critics of Greece, the great- 
est of the world. It has had no Aristarchus. It comes 
to us unaltered. We see this in its numerous repetitions, 
and in some of its descriptions, which recur two or three 
times, and even oftener. We see this also in the many 
additions which have been made to it at sundry times. 
Here we meet with facts of such antiquity as to reach back 
to the cradle of India, and again with things comparative- 
ly modern and of such delicate sweetness and fine melody 
as would seem to be Italian. 

It has not been arranged with that skill which charac- 
terizes the literary works of the West. No one has taken 
such trouble with it. Every one has relied on the unity 
which such an immense diversity receives from a vague 
harmony in which the shades, the colors, and even the 
opposite tunes are blended. It is like the forest and the 
mountain which it describes. Under gigantic trees there 
is a superabundant life, which springs up from smaller 
trees and from an infinitude of shrubs and humbler plants, 
which those wood-giants permit to exist under them, and 
over which they pour down their showers of blossoms ; 
and these great vegetable amphitheatres are full of life. 
On high soar and flutter birds of a hundred kinds and 
colors ; apes swing from the intermediate branches, and 
now and then the mild-eyed gazelle is seen beneath. Is 
this totality a chaos ? By no means. The agreeing diver- 
sities deck themselves with a commingling charm. At 
evening, when the sun extinguishes his overwhelming 
light in the Ganges, when the noises of life are silent, the 
skirt of the forest exhibits all this animation, so diverse 
and yet so well blended, in the peace of the sweetest 
twilight, in which all things love each other and sing 



4 Bible of Humanity. 

together. A common melody emerges. This is the 
Rdmayana. 

Such is the first impression. Nothing so great, nothing 
so sweet. A glorious ray of the all-pervading* goodness 
gilds and illuminates the poem. All its actors are loving 
and tender, and in the modern parts of the poem they dis- 
play a feminine saintliness. It is nothing but love, friend- 
ship, mutual regard, prayers to the gods, veneration to 
the Brahmans, the saints and the anchorites. In this last 
particular especially, the poem is inexhaustible. This 
veneration recurs in it every instant. The whole poem is 
tinted with a coloring eminently Brahmanical. Our Hindoo 
scholars have been so greatly misled by this appearance 
that they at first believed the author or the authors of it 
to have certainly been Brahmans, as were those of the 
other great Indian epic, the Mdhdbhdrata. And yet, by 
a strange inadvertency, not one of them has discovered 
that, in the main, the two poems are in perfect contrast. 

Look at this enormous mountain covered with forests. 
Do you see nothing in it ? Look then at that blue point 
on the ocean where the water seems so deep. Do you 
see nothing there ? 

At that very spot, at the depth perhaps of a hundred 
thousand fathoms, there is a pearl of such extraordinary 
brilliancy that I see it through that depth of water ; and 
under the enormous mass of that mountain there shines a 
strange eye — a certain mysterious thing, which, were it 
not for its peculiar glowing, we would take for a dia- 
mond in which the lightning flashed. This is the soul 
of India, a secret, hidden soul, and in it there is a talis- 
man which India herself wishes not to see too much. 
If you venture to question her about it you will receive 
no other answer than a silent smile. 

I must, then, speak for her. But it is necessary first to 
prepare my western reader who is so distant from all this. 

* This is the meaning of the Sanscrit word Vishnu. 



India, 5 

I could not make myself understood if at the start I did 
not explain how India recovered at the close of the last 
century, when her ancient worship and forgotten arts 
were first made known to Europe, suffered her Sacred 
Books, which no one had been allowed to read, to be 
opened to the world — those books which contain her 
primitive thoughts, simple and naked, and thus throw a 
profound light on all her developments. 

How Ancient India was recovered. 

To the last century belongs the glory of recovering the 
ethical system of Asia, the sacred philosophy of the East, 
the existence of which had so long been denied and 
buried in oblivion. For two thousand years Europe had 
reviled her old mother. One-half of mankind contemptu- 
ously spat upon the other half. 

In order to bring to light Ancient India, so long buried 
under error and slander, it was useless to ask the advice 
of her enemies. It was necessary to go among her own 
people, and to study her books and her laws. 

At the period to which we refer, criticism began to 
inquire whether indeed the whole wisdom of man was 
confined to Europe alone, and even dared to attribute a 
part of it to fruitful and venerable Asia. This question- 
ing was a manifestation of a degree of faith in the general 
kinship of mankind, in the unity of the soul and reason, 
which indeed are identical, whatever the diverse disguise- 
ments of manners and times. 

While Europe was debating, a young man named 
Anquetil Duperron, eighteen years of age, who was study- 
ing Oriental languages at the Bibliotheque of Paris, re- 
solved to go to the East and bring from thence the prim- 
eval books of Persia and India. He was poor and had not 
the means to make so long and expensive a journey in an 
enterprise which so many wealthy Englishmen had under- 
taken without any result. But he bound himself by an 
oath to accomplish it, and he did. 



6 Bible of Huma,7iity. 

An executive officer of the Government, to whom he 
was recommended, approved of his project and made him 
fair promises. But that was all. Relying, therefore, 
upon himself, he enlisted as a soldier in a company of 
recruits for India. On the seventh of November, 1754, he 
left Paris, with six or seven others, behind a bad drummer 
and an old invalid sergeant. It is interesting to read in 
the first volume of his works the strange Iliad which re- 
lates all that he encountered, endured, and overcame. 

At that time India was divided among thirty Asiatic 
and European nations. It was by no means the same 
India that Jacquemont found it at a later day, under the 
administration of the English. At every step Anquetil 
met with obstacles. He was four hundred leagues from 
the city where he hoped to find the books and their in- 
terpreters, when the means of advancing failed him. He 
was told that the whole country was densely wooded, and 
full of tigers and wild elephants. But he proceeded on his 
journey ; and even when his guides were alarmed and for- 
sook him, he continued on, the tigers withdrawing, and 
the elephants respecting him as he passed by. He 
pressed forward through the forests and reached his place 
of destination. But though unmolested by the ferocious 
beasts, this vanquisher of monsters was assailed by 
the diseases of the climate ; and, what was still more to 
be dreaded, the women conspired against the daring 
youth whose heroic soul was concealed beneath a charm- 
ing countenance. The European Creoles, the bayaderes, 
and the sultanas — all this lustful Asia — endeavored to 
turn him from his aspirations. They beckoned him from 
their terraces, but he closed his eyes to their invitations. 
His bayadere, his sultana, was the undecipherable old 
book. In order to understand it, he must win over and 
bribe the Parsees who sought to deceive him. For ten 
years he pursued them, pressed them closely, and finally 
wrested from them what they knew. But their knowl- 
edge was defective, and he enlightened them and taught 



India. 7 

them. And thus the Persian Zend-Avesta and an epitome 
of the Indian Vedas were translated. 

Everybody knows with what glowing interest the savans 
of Europe carried on what our hero had conjectured. 
The whole East is now revealed. Volney and Sacy 
opened up Syria and Arabia. Champollion, standing by 
the Sphinx, the mysterious Egypt, construed her inscrip- 
tions, and showed that she was a civilized empire sixty 
centuries before Jesus Christ. Eugene Burnouf estab- 
lished the consanguinity of the two ancestors of Asia — 
the two branches of the Aryas, the Indo-Persians of 
Bactriana ; and the Parsee scholars who had been edu- 
cated in the College of France quoted in the most remote 
regions of Hindostan this Western Magician against their 
Anglican disputant. 

Then from the depths of the earth was seen ascending a 
Colossus, five hundred times higher than the Pyramids — 
monument full of life and vigor — the gigantic flower of 
India — the divine Ramayana." 

The M&h&bharata, the poetical encyclopedia of the 
Brahmans, the expurgated translations of the books of 
Zoroaster, and the splendid heroic history of Persia — the 
Shah-Nameh — came next. It was known that behind 
Persia, behind the Brahmanic India, there was extant a 
book of the remotest antiquity, of the first pastoral age — 
an age which preceded the agricultural. This book, the 
Rig- Veda, a collection of hymns and prayers, enables 
us to follow the shepherds of that early period in their 
religious aspirations — the first soarings of the human mind 
towards heaven and light. In 1833 Rosen published a 



* It does not become one as ignorant as myself to distribute the glory of 
this achievement, which belongs respectively to France, England, and Ger- 
many, or to indicate the proportion of praise that is due to the founders of 
Indian lore — to the schools of Paris, Calcutta, and London — to Sir William 
Jones, Colebrook, Wilson, Miiller, Lassen, Schlegel, Chezy — to the three 
Burnoufs, etc. Some writers have dealt with this subject, and others will yet 
unfold it better than I can. 



8 Bible of Humanity. 

specimen of it. It can now be read in the Sanscrit, Ger- 
man, English, and French. In this very year 1863, a pro- 
found and able critic, who is also a Burnouf, has expounded 
its true meaning, and shown its scope. 

In consequence of all this research we can now see the 
perfect agreement between Asia and Europe — the most re- 
mote age and the present era. It has taught us that man, 
in all ages, thought, felt, and loved in the same way ; and 
therefore there is but one humanity — a single heart only. 
A great harmony has been established through all space 
and time. Let the silly irony of sceptics, teachers of 
doubt, who hold that truth varies according to latitude, 
be forever silenced. The feeble voice of sophists expires 
in the immense concert of human brotherhood. 

Indian Art. 

Whatever the English may do to make it appear that 
the Indian Bible is more modern than the Jewish, it must 
be admitted that primeval India was the original cradle, 
the matrix of the world, the principal and dominant 
source of races, of ideas, and of languages for Greece, 
Rome, and modern Europe, and that the Semitic move- 
ment — the Jewish-Arabian influence — though very con- 
siderable, is nevertheless secondary. 

But if the English were constrained to admit her re- 
nowned antiquity, yet they affirmed that India was dead 
and buried forever in her Elephantina grottos, her Vedas 
and her Rdmayana, like Egypt in her pyramids. They 
regarded the country, as large as all Europe, and her 
population of one hundred and eighty millions of souls, 
as insignificant, and even contemptuously declared that 
this numerous people were made up from the refuse of a 
worn-out nation. 

Haughty England, that considered India as a land fit to 
be cultivated only for the purpose of enriching her rapa- 
cious rulers, together with the indignities heaped upon 
her people by both protestants and catholics, and the in- 



India. 9 

difference of all Europe, made it appear that the Indian 
soul was really dead. Was not the very race dried up ? 
What is the feeble Hindoo, with his delicate, feminine hand, 
compared with the blond European, nourished, surfeited 
with strong meat and drink, and doubling his force of race, 
with that half-drunken rage which the devourers of meat 
and blood always exhibit ? 

The English do not hesitate to boast that they have 
killed India. The wise and humane H. Russell thought so, 
said so. They have oppressed her with taxes and pro- 
hibitory tariffs,* and discouraged her arts as far as it was 
possible. In the more humane markets of Java and 
Bassora the products of Indian art find a ready sale, 
and it is solely because of this high estimate of the east- 
ern merchants that her arts exist. 

The specimens of Indian art exhibited in England in 
185 1 surprised and confounded the English people ; and 
when Mr. Royle, a conscientious Englishman, explained 
these marvels of enchantment, the jury could not award 
them a prize, because the prizes were only to be given on 
11 the progress of fifteen years," while these productions 
of India were the work of an eternal art, alien to every 
fashion, and more ancient than our arts, which are old 
at their beginning. 

In order to secure a fair specimen of Indian art for the 
Exhibition, a prize of twelve and a half dollars was offered, 
and was carried off by Hubioula, a common weaver of 
Golconda, who produced a piece of muslin, which threw 
into the shade all English textile fabrics, and which was 
so fine that it could be put through a small ring, and so 
light that three hundred yards of it weighed less than two 
pounds. It was a genuine gauze, like that with which Ber- 
nardin de Saint Pierre clothed his Virginia, like those in 

* The production of cotton, which was forced upon India in 1863, will be of 
no more advantage to her people than was the forced cultivation of opium 
and indigo, which have been and are the despair of Bengal ; and some of the 
English governors have loyally tried to remedy this grievance. 



io Bible of Humanity. 

which Aureng Zeb wrapped the corpse of his beloved 
daughter when he laid her in the white marble mausoleum 
of Aurungabad. But neither the endeavors of Mr. Royle, 
nor the acknowledgment of the French that they were 
treated'better than the Orientals, could induce England to 
give her Indian subjects any other reward than these bar- 
ren words : " For the charm and beauty of the invention, 
and the distinctness, variety, commingling and happy 
blending of colors, there is nothing to be compared to it. 
What a -lesson for European manufacturers ! " * 

Oriental art is by far the most brilliant and the least 
costly. The cheapness of labor is excessive ; I had almost 
said deplorable. The workman lives on a trifle. A hand- 
ful of rice satisfies him for a day. And then the mildness 
of the climate, the admirable air and light, the ethereal 
food which is taken through the eyes, and the singular 
beauty and harmony of all nature, develop and refine the 
perceptions and make the senses acute. This is notice- 
able even in all the animals, and especially in the elephant, 
who, though huge and shapeless in bulk and rough in 
exterior, is a voluptuous connoisseur of perfumes, selecting 
the most fragrant herbs and showing his preference for 
the orange-tree, which he first smells, and then eats its 
flowers, its leaves, and its wood. Here man acquires an 
exquisite fineness of perception and feeling. Nature 
makes him a colorist and endows him with special privi- 
leges as her own child. He lives with her, and all that he 
does is charming. He combines the most diverse strains, 
and commingles the dullest hues in such a manner as to 
produce the sweetest and most exquisite effect. 

The sky does everything for the Oriental. A quarter 
of an hour before sunrise and a quarter of an hour after 
sunset he enjoys that supreme privilege, the perfect vision 

* Report of the Juries, II., 1858. This has been admirably repeated, over 
and over again, by our French Juries, Messrs. Delaborde, Charles Dupin, 
and especially by Mr. Albert de Beaumont. Revue des Deux Mo?ides, 
October 15, 1S61, >xxv., 924. 



India. 1 1 

of light, which is then divine with its peculiar transfigura- 
tions and inward revealings, with its tenderness and 
glory in which his soul is swallowed up — lost in the bound- 
less ocean of a mysterious Friendship." 

In the midst of this ineffable mildness the humble, feeble, 
half-nourished, and wretched-looking being conceives the 
idea of the wonderful Indian shawl. As the profound 
poet Valmiki beheld his great poem, the Ra may ana, 
gathered, as it were, in the hollow of his hand, so this 
poetic weaver perceives the whole design that he would 
execute, and begins his great artistic work which some- 
times is continued through a century. His son or his 
nephew, with the same soul, hereditary and identical, and 
with the like delicate hand, will follow the same line of 
thought and carry it on until completed. 

In the execution of strange and exquisite jewelryt and in 
the fanciful ornamentation of furniture and arms, the hand 
of the workman is unique. Some of the latest Princes of 
India sent to the Exhibition referred to, arms which had 
been w r orn by their ancestors, and therefore so peculiarly 
dear to them, as well as of such great value, that we can 
scarcely understand how they consented to entrust them 
to others. Another of those Rajahs sent a bedstead of 
ivory, possibly of his own workmanship, as he super- 
scribed his name on it, which was sculptured and carved 
with infinite ingenuity and delicacy — an exquisite, chaste, 
or virgin-like piece of furniture, full of love, it seems, and 
of dreams. Are these objects things ? They seem to be 
almost human, and to be possessed with the ancient soul 



* In the Rig- Veda, the "Friend," Mitra, does not designate the sun, but 
the effulgence which precedes and follows it. 

\ The jewelry of India, according to Mr. Delaborde, has not the trifling 
lightness of the Genoa or Paris filigree ; and her sculptures, so light and airy 
(as on the Abbas' and other monuments), do not concentrate the attention on 
one point, nor seek to make an impression by exaggerated reliefs or conspicu- 
ous contrasts of light and shade, but entice you to the contemplation of the 
whole, as if a lace of marble were stretched over it. 



12 Bible of Humanity. 

of India, as well as with that of the artist who made them, 
and the Princes who used them. 

But these sumptuous productions of rare artists do not 
indicate the genius of the race so fully as do the inferior 
arts and the more simple handiwork. Without expense 
or noise the Hindoos, with apparent ease, produce works 
that appear to us very difficult. With a little clay for a 
crucible, and for bellows a couple of the strong, elastic 
leaves peculiar to the country, a single man in the forest 
will, in a few hours, turn the crude ore into iron, and 
again, with the addition of swallow wort, turn the iron into 
steel, which, when carried by caravans as far as the 
Euphrates, is called Damascus Steel. 

It has been observed by many that the peculiar chemical 
insight of this people has enabled them not only to ex- 
tract the most vivid colors, but also the corresponding 
grade of mordant, which fixes and makes these colors 
eternal. The Indian spinster,* with her native instinct 
and no other machine than her spindle and her delicate 
hands, will obtain a thread of incredible fineness, with 
which the most intricate and beautiful designs are exe- 
cuted. 

Some one has said : " Instead of sending to Cashmere 
some hideous designs of shawls, which would corrupt the 
Indian taste, let us send our pattern-drawers to India to 
contemplate its brilliant nature and to imbibe its pure 
light." But it would be necessary that these designers 
should also catch the soul and the profound harmony of 
India, for between the great calmness of the patient soul 
of the Hindoo and the subduing mildness of the nature 
that surrounds him, there is such a complete agreement 
that the man and the nature can scarcely realize that each 
is distinct from the other. Nor is this the effect of quie- 
tude simply, as some believe, but of that singular faculty, 
peculiar to the race, of seeing life at the bottom of every 

♦Charles Dupin: Exhibition of 1851, i., 462. 



India. 13 

thing, and the soul in every living body. The herb is not 
simply an herb, nor the tree only a tree, but both herb 
and tree are the vehicles for the circulation of the divine 
spirit ; and the animal is not all animal, but a soul that 
has been or will be a man. Without this faith they could 
never have accomplished the first and most rrecessary of 
all arts in the earliest times, the art of taming and human- 
izing the most important and useful servants, without which 
man could not have long existed. Without the dog and 
the elephant man would have been at the mercy of the 
lion and the tiger. The books of Persia and India relate 
in a grateful manner how the dog was the first preserver 
of man, and how the men of those days formed friend- 
ships and entered into alliances with the very strong and 
large dogs which could strangle the lion. And, in the 
Maliabharata it is narrated that the hero of that poem 
declined the reward of heaven unless he could enter para- 
dise with his dog. 

In lower India and in hot climates where the dog was 
lacking in strength, or was easily alarmed and fled from 
the tiger, men invoked the protection of the elephant ; 
but this was a more difficult alliance, for though the ele- 
phant becomes gentle in maturity, it is brutal, irascible, 
and capricious in youth, and terrible in its gluttony, and 
in its amusements, and therefore was scarcely less formid- 
able than the tiger. And when we consider that to train 
a horse, which is so small compared to the elephant, a bit 
and spurs of steel, and reins and bridles are needed, it 
must have seemed an almost hopeless undertaking to curb 
and restrain by force this living mountain, this mighty 
Colossus. 

They succeeded, however, and nothing could have been 
greater or more beautiful. It was a moral victory. They 
treated the elephant as if he were a man, a wise man, a 
Brahman,* and he was influenced by it and behaved accord- 

* Yudishtra, the Pandu. 



14 Bible of Humanity. 

ingly. To-day the treatment is similar ; the elephant has 
two servants to look after him, to remind him of his 
duties and to warn him if he deviates from Brahmanical 
decorum. The comae sits on his neck, scratches his ears, 
guides him, and rules him by the voice, teaching him how 
to behave himself; while the other servant walks beside 
him and teaches him the same lesson with a firm tone and 
equal tenderness of manner. 

At present some writers speak very lightly about all 
that. The elephant has not only been disparaged but 
has greatly degenerated.* He has known servitude and 
has felt the power of man. But in earlier times he was 
fierce and indomitable, and to have made him teachable 
and tractable must have required great boldness, calmness, 
affection, and sincere faith. Then they religiously be- 
lieved what they said to him, and fulfilled their treaties 
with him. They respected the soul of the dead in the 
body of the living; for, according to the doctrines of their 
holy sages, the spirit of some departed one lived in this 
commanding and speechless form. 

When they saw him in the morning, at the hour in which 
the tiger leaves his ambush of night, coming deliberately 
out of the dense jungle and going majestically to drink of 
the waters of the Ganges, empurpled by the dawn, they 
confidently believed that he, too, hailing the opening day, 
became impregnated by Vishnu, the All- Pervading, the 
good Sun, and while immersing in this great Soul, incar- 
nated in himself a divine ray. 



* And yet the judicious traveller, Mr. Fouche d'Obsonville, a cool-headed 
man and free from romantic tendencies, says that he saw in India an elephant, 
who had been wounded in a battle, go daily to the hospital to have his 
wound dressed. In that climate there is great danger from wounds festering, 
and to prevent this they are seared with hot irons. This was the treatment 
which the elephant voluntarily came daily to receive, and though the pain was 
so great as to cause him to groan terribly, he never manifested any violence 
towards the surgeon, but seemed to understand that this severe treatment was 
for his good, and that his tormentor was his friend. 



India. 1 5 

The Primeval Indian Family. — The First Worship. 

We live on light, and our legitimate ancestors are the 
Aryans, the people of light, who on the one hand have 
spread over India, and on the other over Persia, Greece, 
and Rome, and have imparted their ideas, language, arts, 
and gods along a brilliant track like a long vista of stars. 
Happy and fruitful genius which nothing has been able to 
dim, and which still conducts the world in its course by 
the brightness of its milky-way ! 

In the origin of civilization no miracles are to be wit- 
nessed and but little of the wonderful. A peculiar pre- 
cocity of good sense and sagacity were the essential ele- 
ments in the beginning of human history. Those who 
imagine that at the start man acted absurdly and was 
governed by wild imaginations, do not realize that the 
pressing realities of life in those times required the utmost 
discretion, and that if man had not acted sagaciously he 
would have perished. 

In the venerable Genesis of the Aryans, in the Hymns of 
the Rig-- Veda, unquestionably the earliest records of the 
world,* there is stated that two persons, a man and a 
woman, join with one accord in an outburst of thanksgiv- 
ing to the morning light, and sing together a hymn to 
Agni — (Ignis — the Fire). 

"Thanks to the light of the rising day, to the dawn 
longed for, which puts an end to the anxieties and the 
terrors of the night. 

11 Thanks to the hearth, to Agni, the good companion, 



* Handed down through long generations from mouth to mouth, those 
Hymns may have undergone some changes in language and form, but not in 
meaning, and they tell us of the earliest conditions of pastoral life, antedating 
all other histories. The earliest records of Egypt contain nothing but rituals 
and inscriptions ; while the Genesis of the Jews, compiled from traditions, 
though partly ancient, has many modern indications, as for example, it, alludes 
to angels (Persans), and coin, and prostitution, and many other ideas which 
were evidently brought from the captivity. 



1 6 Bible of Humanity, 

who makes the winter cheerful and the house smile ; 
Agni the fosterer ; Agni the sweet witness of the interior 
life." 

This hymn of gratitude was just ; for fire was every- 
thing, and without it life would have been uncertain, mis- 
erable, and destitute. The light of the fire at night drives 
away the wild beasts, the wanderers in the dark. Neither 
hyenas nor jackals like the glimmering of the hearth, and 
even the lion slinks away growling. But the fires of the 
morning, and especially the brightness of the dawn, dis- 
perse these short-sighted ferocious animals, who dread the 
Sun. 

In our modern cities, well lighted with gas, where the 
houses are secured and protected, there is no sense of 
danger ; but what traveller, however bold, who has been 
obliged to spend a night in some lonely spot of a danger- 
ous country, will not confess that he was pleased to see 
the dawn of day ? In those early ages, when men had no 
arms but the club, and the thick, short sword (such as may 
be seen on Assyrian monuments), with which to defend 
themselves against wild animals, and often encountered 
the lion face to face, there was a feeling of insecurity and 
dread of beasts of prey. This was the case even in ancient 
Greece, where were many lions, notwithstanding the cold 
of its winters ; and much more so in Bactriana and Sog- 
diana where the Aryans lived. There the lion and the 
tiger were more numerous and much larger than they are 
at present. It was no uncommon event in those days for 
the family, men and animals, to be aroused in the night by 
the faithful watch dog, who heard at a distance the fearful 
mewing of these monstrous cats (the lion and the tiger). 
The cow would tremble with fear, and the ass would prick 
up his ears to catch the approaching or receding sound. 
According to the Rig- Veda, the ass was the first to dis- 
cover the departure of the lion and to go out into the morn- 
ing air and salute the dawn ; and till it had been seen and 
consulted none of the family ventured abroad. The large 



India. 1 7 

dog, loved and caressed, now led the way and was fol- 
lowed by the men and domestic animals, and next by the 
women and little children, all happy and gay ; even the 
plants looked then new and beautiful. The birds drew their 
heads from under their wings and began to sing on the 
boughs as though delighted with life, and all the people 
with grateful hearts united their voices in ascriptions of 
praise to Light, singing thanks for the enjoyment of 
another day. 

And now we, their remote children, after the lapse of 
thousands of years, are scarcely less moved in reading 
of those venerated infancies of mankind — those striking 
experiences of our ancestors in the simple and ingenuous 
confessions of their terrors by night and their joys and 
thanksgivings in the morning. 

When at night the wolf springs at the throat of the deer 
going to drink, man says : " Anxiety has taken possession 
of me. Come then, come light, and restore to things their 
forms. Light up the sinister paleness I see yonder," and 
then adds these words of profound meaning : " The dawn 
of the morning alone makes us self-reliant." {Aurora 
fecerunt mcntcs conscias.)* 

That the religion of the Hearth had its origin in the 
North, and not in the South, is apparent from the lan- 
guage and customs that prevail in the rigid climate of the 
Asiatic uplands, where the people express the desire to 
live "a hundred winters," and lavish the most tender 
caresses upon the fire, the good companion Agni, and 
where they also speak with great consideration of the 
sheep of Candahar, on account of its warm and delicate 
wool. In one of their nuptial hymns the woman choosing 
her husband is represented as saying, with graceful inno- 

* This is Rosen's translation, though Wilson is more complete, and I use 
it more frequently, sometimes comparing him with Langlois. I am persuaded, 
however, that onlyEmile Burnouf's recent work recognizes fully the character 
of the Rig- Veda, and yet I could wish that he were more particular in fixing 
the dates that separate what belongs to Agni from what belongs to Indra, etc. 
2 



1 8 Bible of Humanity. 

cence : "I come to thee in my weakness. Be considerate 
of me, and I will always be Roma Sd, the mild sheep of 
Candahar, the silky sheep which comes to warm thee."* 

The life of woman among that pastoral people is not 
servile, as it is among hunters or warriors. She is so 
necessary in all their domestic arts that she is absolutely 
the equal of man, and is called, with great propriety, the 
Dam — the mistress of the house — a word more ancient 
than the Sanskrit of the Brahmans or even of the Vedas, 
and which comes from an extinct language, f And then 
in the last part of the beautiful ritual of their marriage 
ceremony there occurs this significant passage, which is 
only applicable to the women of the North, who retain 
their energies till a late period of life : " May she have 
ten children, and her husband be the eleventh ! " An 
admirable sentence, full of beauty and meaning ! An 
outburst of joy drawn from the prophetic heart ! The 
idea is the same as that I expressed in another book : that 
woman, first the child of her husband, later becomes his 
sister, and finally his mother.^ 

Such is woman in the North ; but centuries afterward 
we find her in Lower India, married at eight or ten years 
of age — a mere child whom the husband has to form, and 
whose place as assistant at the sacrifice is usurped by a 
young anchorite, a novice, a disciple. How totally unlike 
to the primeval life of Upper Asia, where woman is a per- 
son and married at maturity, § and becomes the Dam or 
Lady, the mistress of the house, the coadjutor of domestic 
worship, and shares equally with man in the pontificate. 
There she knows Agni " in his three forms, in his three 
languages, and in his three aliments ; " and knows the 
male and female fuel which are his father and mother. 
She also makes for him the sacred butter and his favo- 



* Emile Burnouf, 136, 240. f Ibidem, 191. \D Amour. 

§ At present in her fifteenth or sixteenth year. See Elphinston, Perrin, 
etc. 



India. 1 9 

rite spirituous liquor, the Soma.* The saying prevails in 
India to the present day that, "As black coffee is rich in 
ideas though poor in love, so S6ma is the friend of joy 
and of generation." In the sacred cake, the Soma, and 
in all that makes life cheerful and sanctifies it, there is a 
presentiment of what woman will be in the future — the 
magician Queen, the bewitching Circes, and the powerful 
Medea (without her crimes). 

In the hymns of invocation they remind the fire, in 
a thousand ways, of his profound relations to woman. 
" Everything is ready, dear Agni. We have decked thine 
altar as a spouse her beloved. Dear Agni, thou dost re- 
pose as the child in her mother's womb." 

They had divined that there were male and female 
plants, but not knowing how to distinguish between them, 
they supposed, in their lively and graceful imagination, that 
the female plant was the one which inclined towards or ten- 
derly entwined the other, and willingly lived in its shade. 

These plants are the parents of fire. In the mother 
they scoop a little hollow, in which they cause the father 
to turn briskly.-)- A patient process. Some of the more 

* It is said that Soma is the very flesh of the sacrifice ; hence its botanical 
name : Sarco-Stemma Viminalis, the flesh plant. (Aphylla asclepias acida. 
See Roxburgh, Flora Indica.) 

Under the name of Soma, and, in Persia, Homa, the flesh plant is the Host 
of Asia, as the consecrated wafer is the Host in Europe, and to complete 
the resemblance it is represented as undergoing suffering. (See Stevenson, 
Sdma-veda, and Langlois. Academy of Inscriptions, XIX., 329.) Soma 
fell from the ethereal expanse, a seed of heaven, and grew on a solitary and 
quiet hill. It consecrates itself to martyrdom, submitting to grinding, and, 
with barley and butter, to fermentation, and then it allies itself to and espouses 
the fire, Aditi, the ground of the hearth, the womb of the world. Nourishing 
victim! rewarding men and gods, then wrapping itself in vapor and soaring 
to heaven. All things are renewed. The stars shine brighter. Indra com- 
bats the tempests more successfully. The waters flow more freely, and the 
earth yields more abundantly. 

f Ad. Kuhn. Origin of Fire, 1859; Baudry, Revue Germanique, April 
15 and 30, and May 15, 1861. A remarkable example of the fruitful aid 
which philology affords in ascending the prehistorical ages. Nothing more 
luminous or ingenious than the work in which Mr. Baudry has enlarged. 



20 Bible of Humanity. 

savage tribes depend entirely upon chance for their fire, 
as when the lightning strikes and fires the forest. The 
impetuous races of hot countries extract it from pebbles 
by violence, but many of the sparks that leap from the 
flint are lost and leave no trace behind except astonish- 
ment and obscurity.* 

But to return to our subject : By this friction man ob- 
tained first a little smoke, and then a scarcely visible flame 
appeared, which would have vanished at once, had not 
woman come to its aid. She welcomed the new-born in- 
fant, nourished it with leaves, and preserved its life. . . 
The hymns also testify to the extreme fear which people 
felt in very ancient times of allowing fires to be extin- 
guished, and thus of not being able to preserve the savior 
of life. Woman alone is the preserver of this fire. It is 
to her as a very little child which she loves and nourishes 
with butter, while it, in grateful acknowledgment, con- 
tinues to burn.f 

fathomed, and sometimes corrected, the researches of Mr. Kuhn. It is the 
foundation of an important book on the capital question of primitive origins. 
Vico had first divined that the fire of lightning was, at the beginning, an ob- 
ject of religious worship. The solar fire was worshipped afterwards. This 
worship was natural and by no means absurd, and science in these days ac- 
knowledges it. M. Renan, in a remarkable letter to the great chemist Ber- 
thelot, says : "You have demonstrated to me, in a manner to silence all my 
objections, that the life of our planet has its source in the sun — that every 
force is a transformation of the sun — that the plant, which nourishes our 
hearths is a storehouse of heat from the sun — that the engine is propelled by 
the effect of the sun which slumbers in the subterranean recesses of the coal- 
mines — that the horse derives his strength from the vegetables produced by the 
sun — and all the rest of the work on our planet may be resolved into the 
evaporation of water, which is the direct work of the sun. Before religion 
placed God in the absolute, only one worship was reasonable and scientific — 
the worship of the sun." — Revue des Deux Mondes, t. xlvii., p. 766, Oct. 15, 
1863. 

* This is strikingly illustrated by the two great races of the world : the Indo- 
European, patient and methodic, has left its prolific trail of light ; the Semitic 
has darted some brilliant flashes which have troubled the soul, and too fre- 
quently have darkened the night. 

\ The hymn tells us in a most charming manner, and with infinite delicacy, 
that "the young mother is kind to her frail child, and does not show it, but 



India. 2 1 

As soon as it is strong enough to eat, they feed it with 
barley and the sacred cake. To this substantial food they 
add the liquid aliment. Man takes from the hand of the 
woman the wine of Asia — the Soma which she has pre- 
pared — and throws it into Agni. And now the fire blazes 
and sparkles, and as it mounts upward becomes bluish. 
The home smiles and rejoices. Divine mystery ! The 
most obscure parts of the dwelling share in the festival, 
ar\d long after are reddened by the fantastical reflections 
of the flames. 

But at the very instant of the first sparkle and lively 
ascension of the flame, a voice ascends from two united 
hearts, giving utterance to words full of love and tender- 
ness. Short and artless outburst, followed by deep si- 
lence, but what was said can never be abolished. It is a 
holy hymn which we may read forever, and which after 
six thousand years is as fresh as when first uttered. 

At the same moment in which, without prearrange- 
ment, with one heart they utter this word which will 
never perish, they look upon each other in this divine 
glimpse of flame and see themselves to be divine. (He 
Deva, and She Devi.)* 

In this extreme simplicity, which might be called 
childish, appears the true sacrament of harmonious love, 
the high idea of marriage. "The mortal has made the 
immortal. . . We have generated Agni. The ten 
brothers (the ten fingers), entwined in prayer, have inau- 
gurated his birth and have proclaimed him our male 
child." 

The great characteristic of this race, the foremost in the 
world is, that, while it adores, it is conscious that it has 
made the gods. In the most enthusiastic hymn the ad- 
mired phenomenon, which appears under divine features, 

even hides it from the father. Presently it grows up and stirs. How intelli- 
gent it appears, and how lively its movements ! but let us be vigilant, for, of 
itself, it aspires to rest." — Rig- Veda, Wilson, III., 233 ; Ibid., 35 ; Ibid., p. 2. 
* Em. Burnouf, 191-2. 



22 Bible of Humanity. 

is at the same time so well described, followed and 
analyzed, that we can easily find its birth and progressive 
life. Still more, all these passages in which the names of 
the gods appear stand out in a transparent language, 
and the names are really nothing but appellations.* (The 
Strong, the Brilliant, the Pervading, etc.) 

Then, no superstition ! If the god forgot himself, if he 
became a tyrant, or would have darkened the imagination 
with servile terrors, the mind, armed with such a language 
as to remind him of his origin, would have demanded : 
" Who created thee ? I am thy creator." 

Noble worship, of a high and mighty conception, which 
in giving all preserves all. The blessed and beloved gods 
do not emancipate themselves from man their creator, but 
remain in the circle of general life. If man needs them, 
they need him ; they hear him and come at his call. Man's 
morning praise evokes and allures the sun. It is a power- 
ful charm, and the sun obeys it. When man kindles Agni 
on the brink of the river, on the sacred confluent ; when 
the hand of woman has spread around him a carpet of 
herbs, the gods come promptly in response to the hymn, 
and take their seats in a friendly manner, partake of the 
sacred butter and the sparkling Soma. The gods gave 
the fruitful rains which have made the meadows green 
again, and man gives them the best he has. The sky 
nourishes the earth and the earth the sky. 

Is it to be said that on account of this mutual depen- 
dence the gods are less revered ? They are really loved 
the more. In this benign religion of love without terror, 
the gods mingle freely in the actions of human life, elevat- 
ing them and making them divine. The tender spouse, 
while preparing for man the sacred bread which at evening 

* Max Muller, 557. All this is still fluid in the Vedas. In the 
Homeric Greece these adjectives become substantives, and are personal. All is 
already petrified. This judicious reflection of Max Muller ought to have led 
him to see more clearly the vast antiquity of a people whose worship is evi- 
dently of the first religious period. 



India. 23 

restores him, is assisted by Agni, who also acknowledges 
all her efforts to please him. " Agni is the lover of girls 
and the husband of women." He sanctifies and makes 
glorious the happy moment of generation. 

Whether Agni burns in man, or shines on the hearth, or 
darts his beams from the sky, making the great spouse 
fruitful, he is forever the same. Man feels him in the 
lively warmth of Soma which elevates his spirits, in the 
inventive flame from which the winged hymn takes its 
flight, and in love, as well as in the sun. 

Some people will not fail to say: "All this is pure 
naturalism and without any moral bearing." This is a 
familiar objection made of old. The awakening of 'con- 
science, a divine fruit, blossoms from every religion. 

In very ancient hymns Agni is recognized as the repre- 
sentative of purity which man must imitate, putting aside 
every physical and moral taint. If man does not yet 
know clearly what a moral taint is, he is restless, neverthe- 
less and interrogates Agni as follows : " What is that with 
which thou dost reproach me ? What is my fault, and 
why dost thou speak of it to the water (Varouna), and 
the light (Mitra) ? " etc. ; and thus his troubled soul 
enumerates all the forces of nature before which this 
pure and blameless Agni accuses him. 

These tendencies towards purification gave rise to the 
reformation of Zoroaster. The agricultural tribes, of 
austere character, held to the heroic dogma of work, 
which purifies, to the invisible Agni, the organizer of the 
world. 

The shepherd tribes, more imaginative, extended and 
enlarged the visible Agni to the sky, the sun, the clouds, 
and to everything visible, * and always celebrated and 

* In proportion as they observed that heat was in that element or in that 
form of life, the divine names were multiplied, but not the gods. There is no 
mistake about this. The hymns express this, and notice in clear terms the 
monotheistic simplicity which pervades all this variety. "Agni, thou art 
born Varouna (water, air), and thou dost become Mitra (the sweet glim- 



24 Bible of Humanity. 

worshipped him under his primitive name, which also 
became Indra, the god of the tempests which water and 
renew the meadows. 

This flight of imagination coincides, it would seem, 
with the changes of abode and climate, and with the 
migration of the shepherd tribes, who descended towards 
the East and the South. When a man passes Caboul he 
is struck with astonishment to see all of a sudden in all its 
newness and immensity the Indian landscape, and I do not 
doubt that it was in this place that the transformation of 
Agni into the powerful Indra took place. It is less the 
sun in itself than the god, conqueror of the clouds. This 
country, abounding in large but unequal rivers which 
sometimes become torrents, is subject to severe drouths 
followed by great hurricanes. Its climate is one of com- 
bats, of contrasts, and of atmospheric war. To wage this 
war man generously gave to Indra a bow and a chariot 
and horses. The chariot, as it rolls, mutters. Indra, 
vanquisher and fertilizer, comes near to the panting earth 
and makes love to her by the darts of his thunderbolts ; 
and then seeing over the mountain the black dragon of 
the envious cloud which holds and refuses water, pierces 
the monster with his arrows, and compels him to dis- 
charge the rain from his lacerated sides. 

Innocent ornamentation — very translucent, and but 
slightly charged with either myths or symbols. The faith- 
ful preservation of the word, the song, the sacred and holy 
hymn of their ancestors, was their only art. This people 
pursued its way for about ten centuries, singing from 
Bactriana to the Indus, and afterward to the Ganges. 

mering which precedes and follows the sun). Thou art Indra, the son of 
strength. Thou art Aryaman in thy relations to girls, for thou dost make 
husband and wife of one spirit." — Rig-Veda, Wilson, III., 237. Thus they 
had large liberty, but those who used these names did not by any means see 
in them persons. Religion pursued her way lightly. It helped, but neither 
curbed, nor entangled the mind with low terrors. It had some of the 
serenity and nobility of that smile which was subsequently manifested in 
Greece. 



India. 25 

At every step a song, and the totality of all their songs 
is the Rig- Veda. 

The boundary was the entrance of Hindostan. These 
travellers found themselves in the presence of three Infi- 
nites, either one of which was sufficient to strongly stir up 
their mind. 

On the south there was the Infinity of the sea — a large 
river whose shores were unseen, a beautiful mirror every 
evening burnished by the flaming sun when it plunged 
in its waters. 

On the north a circle of giants, all the peaks of the 
Himalaya, raised up from thirty mountains, bearing all 
climates and all vegetables, and crowned with bright 
snows over a black brow of dark trees. Immense jungles 
full of tigers and serpents spread themselves at its base. 
The Ganges, lined with its colossal forests, flows majes- 
tically towards the East ; a whole living world drinks of 
its waters. 

At last, and this the most terrible, the burning attrac- 
tion of the Hindostanic furnace, the caresses and invita- 
tion of a nature too charming, and of the yellow race,* 
mild and defenceless, of from one to two hundred millions 
of slaves, who so loved and admired the white race that it 
might have perished in their embraces. 

The resistance of the Aryans, this great victory of the 
soul, is one of the most remarkable moral events which 
has ever occurred on earth, and was only maintained 
behind the barrier of castes, which in that climate were 
readily formed on the very rational basis of psychology 
and of natural history. 

First. There was the horror of a blood diet> the idea 
that meat produces dullness and tends to defilement, ren- 
ders unclean and offensive, and that the blood-eater 
seemed to have the odor of a corpse. And meat is unneces- 



* The yellow race, which easily becomes very black. See Vivien de 
Saint-Martin's Geographical Researches, i860. 



26 Bible of Humanity, 

sary in that country, because the fruits of the earth are 
there ripened and cooked by the powerful sun, and con- 
tain admirable juices, which are both substantial and 
nutritious. 

Second. There was the natural terror to be appre- 
hended from the love of an inferior, the formidable 
absorption by the yellow woman (sweet, charming, and 
submissive,* as is seen in China) and by the black woman, 
the most tender, caressing, and loving. If these Aryans 
had not resisted, they would certainly have become extinct. 
By-the animal diet they would have become a drove of 
gross, sleepy, and excitable beings like the Europeans 
who now live there ; and by intermarriage with slaves and 
inferior women they would have lost the gifts of their race, 
especially the inventive power and the brilliant spark that 
shines in the Vedas. 

The yellow woman, with her slanting eyes and the grace- 
fulness of a cat, her inferior and yet artful mind, would 
have reduced the Hindoo to the level of the Mongol, de- 
graded the race of profound thinkers to the lower level of 
the Chinese workman, and extinguished the genius that 
produced the high arts which have changed the whole world. 

Even more. In such a climate, with such inter-com- 
mingling, the small number of the Aryans would probably 
have melted away as a drop of wax in a brazier. India 
appears like a dream, in which everything is fleeting — 
flows and disappears — is transformed and then reappears 
under quite another form. Terrible play of nature, which 
jests with life and death ! The effort by which the human 
genius withstood this was not less terrible. By an im- 
mense imaginative power and a harsh legislation, which 
may appear tyrannical, the Aryans created a new nature of 
invention and force, in order to intimidate, exorcise, and 
disarm the other. 

* Strongly inclined to polygamy. We see this marvelously illustrated in 
Yu-Kiao-Li — Two Female Cousins. Translated by Stanislas Julien. Chap. 
1 6, vol. 2, p. 195. 1863. 



India. 2 J 

The sober-minded, the thinkers, the haughty guardians 
of the Indian genius, constituted themselves an isolated 
people by the absolute abstinence from meat and spiritu- 
ous liquors. This is the origin of the elevated and meri- 
torious title of Brahman. Even the caste of the warriors, 
who use meat sparingly, cannot taste fermented liquors 
without undergoing cruel purifications. At last, by a very 
beautiful effort, the Brahmanical legislation tried to main- 
tain in love and marriage the high idea of the Vedas, the 
monogamic purity, confining marriage to their own 
women, who are haughty and disapprove of the life of the 
harem. 

She is free. Marriage is not a traffic (as among many 
other peoples). The sale of woman is a crime, and an 
object of horror according to the laws of Manu. 

The true formula of marriage, which no society can 
ever surpass, is found and established : 

" Man is not man except as he is triple, that is, man, 
woman, child.* According to the Vedas — the law and 
the sacred ordinances — and in accordance with the popular 
feelings, the wife is the half of the Jiusband sbody, sharing 
equally in all his acts, pure and impure." And so much 
so that every good work of either is of equal advantage 
to the other. The holy man has the happiness of saving, 
by his holiness, her whom he loves. f 

The equality of the two sexes, difficult and impractica- 
ble for this race and in this climate, is nevertheless rec- 
ognized in heaven and manifested in the temple. It beams 
from the altar. Everywhere the wives of the gods are 
seated beside them. 

The mother ! In India this sacred name is so strongly 
imbedded in the heart of man, that it appears to make him 
lose sight of all religious hierarchy. And although he is 
the Pontiff of the family, and alone offers the prayers of 

* Manu, tr. by Loiseleur, IX., 45, p. 322. 

\ Digest, III., 458; Manu, IX., 22, p. 319. The woman, even of an in- 
ferior caste, is saved by the virtue of her husband. 



28 Bible of Humanity, 

the household, he is, notwithstanding, beneath woman : 
" the mother is worth more than a thousand fathers ; the 
field is worth more than the seed." * 

The law seeks to follow out such an ideal in constituting 
the woman the companion of her husband. It gives her 
the household royalty. " Woman is the home. An 
abode in which there is no woman cannot be called a 
home." Nor is this an unmeaning saying. The law gives 
her the control of the receipts and the expenses. Enor- 
mous and decisive concession ! However little energy 
woman may possess, if she make use of it, she, by this 
alone, becomes the equal of her husband and the mistress 
of the house, as much as she was under the Vedas. 

But does nature permit India, this great prophetess, to 
accomplish all that she teaches to mankind ? No. The 
tyranny of the climate does not allow the reality to equal 
this dream of perfection. Woman is marriageable in her 
eighth year. " A man of thirty may marry a girl of 
twelve, and a man of twenty-four, a girl of eight." 
(Manu). This law will ultimately change everything. 
Whatever equality the law may accord to the husband 
and wife, this young wife can only be as a little child to 
her husband. f 

* Manu, IX., 52, p. 324, says : that the earth (woman) is worth more than 
the seed (man). The Hindoo Digest, III., 504, abounds in such passages as 
this : " A mother is worth more than a thousand fathers." 

f I will in another part of the present work speak of Polygamy, Polyandry, 
the Mahahharata, etc. It will be enough to say here that Polygamy is the 
result of certain social causes, and not of the climate. It appears that in 
India monogamy is satisfactory. The wedding is a frigid affair. In the cere- 
mony, and on the very evening of marriage, the husband feigns to start as a 
pilgrim and return to a life of asceticism and penance. His friends prevail on 
him to return to his wife, and compel him to be happy. This husband is no 
longer a young man, for, in this peculiar climate, the man marries late in life, 
as he is prevented, especially if a Brahman, by a long series of examinations, 
trials, and penances, and above all, by religious dreams. The husband is 
therefore infinitely far from the child that is given to him, and the child, not 
understanding him, looks upon him inquiringly. {Digest, II., 1, 35.) She 
is to him as much a pupil as a wife, and the law authorizes him to chastise 



India. 29 

I am not writing the history of India, and therefore I 
will not relate how the Brahmanic law, which was at first 
her safety, became, little by little, her scourge. This is not 
peculiar to India or her laws, but is the common history 
of all religions. We find it in Persia and Egypt. 

Religion, at first springing from a vital cause, and al- 
most always indicating the sincere longings of the heart, 
formulates itself in laws, and establishes a priesthood. 
This law gradually becomes overcharged with harsh pre- 
scriptions, and the priesthood becomes tyrannical and 
sterile. It is like those greenish islets in the seas of 
the south, which by degrees become encumbered with 
corals and shells, then disappear under their growth, and 
finally become nothing but calcareous masses, on which 
nothing can germinate. 

In India no historical work, but two very solemn legends 
explain to us the struggle between the Brahmans and the 
warriors. The former conquered at first, and if we can 
credit them, they owed their victory to a valiant Brahman 
— Parasu Rama — Rama witJi the hatchet (one of the in- 
carnations of Vishnu), who made a terrible slaughter of the 
warriors. These latter, while they submitted to the spirit- 

her when necessary, "as a little pupil." (Manu, VIII., 199, p. 296.) This, 
however, does not prevent the law from saying, with charming contradiction 
(the law doubtless having in mind the adult woman), " Do not strike your 
wife, with even a flower, though she has committed a hundred faults." 
{Digest \ II., 209.) These laws are embarrassing. On one side there is sym- 
pathy for the wife, and on the other there is fear of her, for the little silent 
girl, who demands nothing, does not appear less formidable in the eye of the 
law. The law feels that the woman has an infinite absorption of threatening 
power, conspiring unconsciously with that of the climate. The law is evident- 
ly troubled for the conservation of the helpless man, and so provides that he 
is to live a portion of the time isolated from his wife, and not to love her 
more than twice a month, if he aims at perfection. It would exempt him from 
taking a second wife, but the first wife soon ceases to be a woman, and the 
mortality of children is terrible, so that it becomes necessary to take another 
wife. But there is no cause for fear, for as soon as the perpetuity of the family 
is assured, the indulgent law permits him to leave everything and to become 
an anchorite among the roots of some Indian fig-tree. 



30 Bible of Humanity, 

ual authority of their conquerors, were no less powerful, 
and continued to be the Kings and Rajahs of the country. 
Their bards or court poets (such as may yefbe found 
among the Siks and other tribes) opposed to the Brah- 
mans a rival legend, stating that one or two thousand 
years after the Brahminical Rama, Vishnu incarnated him- 
self in a warrior who was also called Rama, and who was 
the son of a King. This Rama, belonging to the war- 
rior caste, but of a mild and peaceful disposition, is the 
complete idea of India — the hero of the Ramayana* 

The Profound Liberties of India. 

That which makes the Rdmayana a wonder, in spite of 
its innumerable additions, is its interior soul, equipoised 
between two souls, its sweet contradiction, the charm of a 
free mind partly obscured. It is the timid Liberty ador- 
ingly veiled in Grace. It shows itself. It hides itself. It 
asks pardon for existence. 

Under the powerful law of Manu, during the Brahmanic 
reign, when the domineering Caste had laid hold of 
the whole life in infinite detail, and filled the earth with 
thirty thousand gods, nature still existed. Nature pro- 
tests in a low voice, and exhibits herself in love, in pity, 
and in boundless tenderness towards the weak and the 
humble ; not by palpable appearances nor by strong 
flashes of light, but by ineffable glimmerings. It is a 
delicious lamp which shines through alabaster. It is the 



* We can never praise sufficiently the beautiful Italian translation of M. 
Gorresio, who, under the supervision of Burnouf, has likewise edited the 
original text. But why do not people praise the excellent French translation 
of M. Fauche? He is, of all Orientalists, the man who has made the great- 
est sacrifice to science. Poor and in the depths of solitude, finding no pub- 
lisher, he has printed with his own hands, and published at his own expense, 
the nine volumes of this great poem. He is now engaged in translating the 
Mahabharata — a still greater undertaking. But what of it ? He lives out 
of our times — is more active, and no less a Hindoo than if he were a Brah- 
man or a Rishi. 



India. 



31 



divine, the chaste charm of the pearl at the bottom of 
the sea. 

It was not always thus. The live opposition of the 
Castes began, on the contrary, as soon as they came into 
existence in the remotest antiquity. Witness that peculiar 
song (was it the first satire of the world ?) in which the 
people daringly parodied the teachings of the Brahmans.* 
Witness the traditions according to which ancient Indra, 
the conqueror and the scoffer, the mirthful god of nature, 
who sends the rain and fine weather, overtakes and rails 
outrageously at the difficult chastity of the holy ancho- 
rites. Witness, above all, the legend of the Rajah Vieva- 
mitra — a boastful history which from age to age has 
pursued and threatened the Brahminical authority. This 
king, celebrated as a writer of Hymns of the Vedas, re- 
nowned for his hundred sons, and for his generous adop- 
tion of the inferior tribes, took a fancy to become a 
Brahman, but was rejected and underwent the most se- 
vere mortifications and self-tortures for a thousand years, 
acquiring by this means such merits and such formidable 
power that he could annihilate the whole world, earth and 
heaven, men and gods, by a single frown. The gods, 
affrighted, came down to his hermitage, and, surrounding 
him, besought him to spare the world, and secured his 
promise that it should exist. It is to be noticed that 
this terrible saint never dies. He is always dangerous. 
He lived at the time of the Vedas. Some thousands of 
years afterward he reappears in the Ramayana. He 
is the most profound and intimate embodiment of the 
Indian soul. This soul makes and can destroy, creates 
and can annihilate. It reminds all the gods that it created 
them, and can with a frown blot them out. It has the 
power but will not exercise it. Entirely free, it has a 
most tender regard for the gods and would be horrified if 
they were injured. It loves them especially, because, 

* It is the song of the frogs, who preach and teach. Max Muller, page 
494- 



32 Bible of Humanity. 

through their cloudy and sublime existence, it has a 
glimpse of itself. 

It is the enormous privilege and the unique royalty of 
this Indo-Grecian race to see where the other races do not 
see, to penetrate worlds of ideas and dogmas, and the 
deep strata of gods, piled upon each other. And all this 
without effort, without criticism, and without malignity ; 
by the simple exercise of a wonderful vision, by the sim- 
ple force of a look, by no means ironical, but terribly clear, 
as through a hundred lenses placed one over the other. 

This transparency is the peculiar grace of the Rama- 
yana. From the beginning the author prostrates himself 
and remains on his knees out of regard to Brahmanism, 
but sees perfectly through it. In his first songs he ascribes 
all that can be imagined of veneration and tenderness (and 
is evidently sincere) to the high and sacred Caste. But 
at the same time he unfolds a new revelation, a new ideal 
of holiness : the god-warrior, incarnated, not in the 
Brahmanic Caste, but in a Chatrya* (a warrior). 

And that which he says, and which I have already 
quoted in the second page of this volume, is no less 
strong : that the Rdmayana addresses itself not only to the 
Brahman and the warrior, but also to the merchant (Vesya), 
which is a very numerous Caste, and which, according 
to the etymology of the word, originally meant the people. 
He does not dare to speak of the Sudras, but what he 
adds is stronger than if he had mentioned them. He 
leaves them out, but he says : " If a slave hears this poem 
sung, he is ennobled." Now the slave is far beneath the 
Sudra, who is of the fourth Caste. The slave is out of all 
Castes, out of the Indian world ; and if this outcast may 
be ennobled and share in the benediction of the Rdma- 
yana, no one is beyond the reach of divine mercy. All 

* This is something analogous to the revolution which St. Louis introduced 
among Christians ; when people saw a layman, a warrior, a king — the most 
powerful King of Europe — becoming the ideal of holiness, they exclaimed : 
4 '0 holy layman, whose works the priests ought to imitate !" 



India. 33 

may be saved. The salvation is extended to all. After 
the ancient Rama of the Brahmans (the Rama with the 
Hatchet) and of the severe law, came the Rama of the 
warriors, clement and merciful, the universal Savior, the 
Rama of Grace. 

The groundwork of the poem is very simple. It is the 
story of the old King Dacaratha and of his admirable, ac- 
complished, and adorable son Rama. Being worn out, the 
king is on the point of consecrating his son and abdicat- 
ing the throne. But a favorite woman, a mother-in-law, 
prevailed upon the aged man to grant her whatever gift 
she should demand, and asked the exile of Rama and the 
crowning of her own son. This son declined the crown, 
but Rama, out of respect to his father's promise, insists 
on his accepting, and then goes into exile. Accompanied 
by his wife and a younger brother, Rama started for the 
solitudes. Admirable occasion for the poet ! Love and 
friendship in the desert ! A sublime and delicious hermi- 
tage in this Indian paradise ! 

11 From the first moment that I saw the marvels of this 
magnificent mountain — the holy mount Tchitrakouta — I 
care not for my exile, my lost crown, or this solitary life. 
Let my years be spent here with thee, my dear Sita, and 
with my young brother, Laksmana, and I am satisfied. 

11 Behold those sublime crests of the mountain which 
reach up into the sky and dazzle with brightness ! Some 
in masses of silver, some in purple and opal, others in 
emerald green, and this one like a diamond sparkling with 
light. 

11 The great forests are peopled with thousands of birds, 
apes, and leopards. Cedars, sandalwood, ebony, lotus, 
and banana trees, make shades embalmed with flowers 
and opulent with fruits. Everywhere springs, brooks, and 
murmuring cascades. The whole mountain seems to be a 
gigantic elephant intoxicated with love. 

" Child with the candid smile, look yonder at the sweet 
Mandakirti — the river of limpid waters, with its cranes and 
3 



y 



34 Bible of Humanity. 

its swans — shaded by the red lotus, the blue nenuphar, by 
its children of flower trees and fruit trees, and studded 
with beautiful islands. O how delightful the sight of that 
flock of gazelles, coming one after another to the bank of 
the river to slake their thirst ! 

" Look at these trees at the base of the mountain, 
which under the wind so modestly bend, and pour down 
a shower of flowers. Some of these flowers perfuming 
the ground, and others here and there floating on the 
waters. Look at the red goose mounting in happiness to 
the sky, and with a cheerful song saluting the morning. 

" It is the hour in which the pious Rishis plunge be- 
neath the sacred waves. Come then thou with me. This 
is the holiest of rivers. Tell me, my dear, are not this 
river and this mountain worth the empire and the opulent 
cities, and all that we have renounced ? Thou and my 
beloved brother, ye are my delight ! " 

All that Rama says here about this beautiful landscape 
is characteristic of the entire poem. In its incomparable 
richness the poem is worthy of that India which it sur- 
rounds, and magnificently adorns. The process seems to 
be that of the charming art of the country, the sovereign 
art of the Cashmere, the persevering industry of the con- 
tinued web in which successive ages have put their work 
and their love. 

At first it is an exquisite sacred shawl, or scarf for 
Vichnou, in which the marvellous birth of Rama, his city, 
his marriage, and his beautiful Sita, form the warp of the 
poem. 

Around this warp all nature, mountains, forests, rivers, 
Indian landscapes, the seasons of the year, all the good 
friends of man, animals, and vegetables, are woven as if 
into a charming carpet. 

This carpet, however grand, enlarges itself and compre- 
hends arts, trades, palaces, towns, kiosks, bazars, and 
harems. It then becomes like atent, a marvellous pavilion, 
in which the whole world may be sheltered. 



India. 35 

Suspended from the immense forests and the peaks of 
the Himalaya, it shades the whole of India, from the 
Indus to Bengal, and from Benares to Ceylon, without 
obscuring the sky, for that very tent is the sky of India. 
But let us rest here. This book is not a literary history. 
It pursues only the great moral results. 

In Rama are reunited the twofold ideals of the two great 
Castes. On one side he attains the highest point of 
Brahmanic virtue, and on the other he adds to it the 
highest devotion of the warrior, who, for the sake of 
others, hazards not only himself, but sometimes those 
whom he loves more than himself. In the defence of the 
frail, of solitary anchorites, who are troubled by wicked 
spirits, he sacrifices more than his life — his love, his charm- 
ing, faithful, and devoted wife, Sita. The complete man, 
this Brahman warrior, is then still nearer to God than is 
the Brahman who simply prays, but does not make any 
personal sacrifice. 

Rama follows the exact ideal of the Khatrya, the high 
ideal of the chivalry, to win and to pardon — to wait until 
the wounded enemy recovers — to give and 7iever to receive. 

In reading this poem we are almost persuaded that 
we are reading the Shah Namch or our Celto-Germanic 
poems. This peaceful warrior is the very opposite to the 
irritable character which the poet attributes to even the 
holiest of the Brahmans, who, for slight causes or involun- 
tary offences, hurl the terrible anathema, which dooms a 
man to be bound, bewitched, and sometimes to be trans- 
formed into a monster. Referring to the remark " not to 
receive anything whatever," the poem with its uniform 
sweetness, but with a winning art, makes, through Rama, 
an indirect satire on the Brahmans, who always received 
and frequently exacted. From this we perceive that in 
the future will appear the mendicant Brahman, the glutton, 
and the buffoon of the court, who will become the subject 
of satire in the Indian drama. (See Sakuntald.) 

The Ramayana was evidently composed to be sung 



2,6 Bible of Humanity. 

at the tables and in the courts of the Rajahs, where the 
Brahmans had only a secondary rank, and hence the re- 
citals of innumerable combats, monstrously exaggerated, 
which are the great blemish of this poem. But in com- 
pensation we find in it a generous grandeur, outbursts of a 
frank nature, and heroic imprudences, of which a priestly 
book would never be guilty. 

In a maternal transport, the mother of Rama, indignant 
because of the exile of her son, says to the King : " Re- 
member, O mighty King, this celebrated and powerful 
couplet : ' Brahma one day declared that he had weighed 
in his scale truth against a thousand sacrifices, and that 
truth outweighed the sacrifices.' " Sita also, led away 
by her grief and her desire to follow Rama, pronounced 
this potent sentence, which overthrows the very founda- 
tions of the Brahmanic edifice : " A father, a mother, or 
a son, in this world and in the next, eats only the fruits 
of his own works ; a father is neither rewarded nor 
punished for his son ; neither is the son for his father. 
Each one by his own actions brings on himself the good 
or the evil," etc. 

Who is this little girl, this bold-spirited child ? Let 
us try to comprehend her. 

The great King Vigvamitra, one of the ancestors of 
Rama, and author of many sublime hymns, notwithstand- 
ing his great piety, seems to have paid but little heed to 
the barrier of Castes. Fifty of his hundred sons were 
born of Dasyas, captives, and yellow women, on whom he 
had bestowed his favors. Hence it would appear that 
this high type of Priest-King embraced in his immense 
heart all Castes and all conditions. 

The Ramayana does not state with sufficient clearness 
whence comes the wife of Rama, the lovely Sita. Now 
she is the daughter of a king, and now she is born of the 
furroiv (which is the meaning of Sita). It may be that 
Rama took her from among the natives — a woman who was 
the daughter of a king and a captive maiden — after the 



India. i>7 

example of his illustrious ancestor ; or possibly she may 
have belonged to the gentle Chinese race, so much 
esteemed in the harem, whose winning grace and lustrous 
drooping eye troubles the saints, and even the demons, 
with whom, perhaps, the Chinese women have some rela- 
tionship. 

But beyond the human Castes, there is still another 
Caste — a prodigious Caste — very humble, and very 
numerous. This is the poor animal world, which is to be 
saved and elevated. This is the triumph of India, of 
Rama and of the Ramayana. 

The Redemption of Nature. 

One is never saved alone. Man does not deserve his 
salvation but by the salvation of all. The animal has also 
its rights before God. "The animal! Mysterious! Im- 
mense world of dreams and silent griefs ! Without lan- 
guage, too many visible signs express these griefs. All 
nature protests against the barbarity of man who disowns, 
degrades, and tortures his inferior brother." 

This sentence which I wrote in 1848 has frequently re- 
curred to me. In the month of October of the year 
1863, near a lonely sea, in the last hours of night, while 
the winds and the waves were silent, I heard the humble 
voice of our domestic animals. These voices of captivity 
in faint and plaintive tones, came to me from the lowest 
parts of the house, from the depths of obscurity, and 
filled me with melancholy. Impression, serious and posi- 
tive and not of vague sensibility. The more advanced 
we become in life, the more we appreciate the full signi- 
ficance of its realities, the more clearly do we understand 
the serious and simple things, which in the ardor of life 
we overlook. 

Life, death, the daily destruction involved in animal 
food, are hard and bitter problems which rise up before 
me. Miserable contradiction ! The feeble nature of the 
North, with her poverty of vegetation, could not restore 



38 Bible of Humanity. 

our energies, and fit us for labor, which is our first duty, 
without animal food ! death ! forgetfulness of mercy ! 
Let us hope that in another world we will be spared from 
the degrading and cruel fatalities of this. 

In India piety has produced the effects of wisdom. It 
has made the conservation and salvation of all beings a 
religious duty, and has been rewarded. It has secured to 
her an eternal youth. Notwithstanding all her disasters, 
the respected, cherished, multiplied, and superabundant 
animal life, has given to India the renewals of an inex- 
haustible fertility. 

No one can evade death either for himself or for others. 
But mercy demands at least that none of these short-lived 
creatures should die without having lived, and loved, and 
transmitted through love its little soul, and performed 
that sweet duty which the tenderness of God imposes, " to 
have had the divine moment." 

Hence the beautiful and really pious beginning of the 
Rdmayana is this exquisite outburst of Valmiki upon the 
death of a poor heron, in which utterance he weeps : " O, 
hunter, may thy soul never be glorified in all the lives to 
come, for thou hast stricken that bird in the sacred moment 
of love!" 

His moanings are measured by the ebb and flow of his 
heart ; and this is poetry. The wonderful poem begins. 
This immense river of harmony, of light, and of divine 
joy, the largest that ever flowed, has its origin in this 
little source— a sigh and a tear. 

True benediction of genius. While in the West the 
most dry and sterile minds are proud in the presence of 
inferior nature, the Indian genius, the richest and most 
prolific, knows neither the little nor the great, but gene- 
rously embraces the whole as a universal brotherhood, as if 
all possessed but one soul. 

You may cry " superstition ! — that this excessive good- 
ness towards animals comes from the dogma of the trans- 
migration of souls." It is ust the contrary. It is beciuse 



India, 3 9 

this race, of acute sensibility and penetrating, feels and 
loves the soul even in the forms of the inferior, in the 
feeble and simple, that it has created the doctrine of trans- 
migration. It is not faith that makes the heart, but the 
heart that makes faith. - * 

Whatever may be its heart or faith, India cannot alto- 
gether escape from this contradiction of the world. 

The vegetarian Brahman remains feeble and needs a 
warrior to protect him. The warrior has not the strength, 
but in partaking of a little animal food acquires it, to- 
gether with the passions which it engenders. Hence the 
fall and evil. Hence the catastrophe which makes the 
plot of the Ramayana. This poem had its origin in 
mercy and its drama in the oblivion of mercy. Woman, 
the most tender-hearted of beings, is tempted and drawn 
away from her natural goodness by, I know not what bad 
dream, earnest wish, or fondling desire. It is not greedi- 
ness. The Indian Eve does not molest the fruit on any 
of the trees of Paradise. Her paradise is love, and she 
covets nothing else. She is nothing but sweetness and 
timid innocence, t Nevertheless, by an utmost unaccount- 

* A new criticism, stronger and more serious, is now offered. Religions, so 
profoundly studied at present, have been subordinated to the genius that 
made them, to the soul which created them, and to the moral condition of 
which they are the fruit. We must first locate the race with its proper apti- 
tudes, its surroundings, and' its natural inclinations ; then we may study it in 
the fabrication of its gods, who in their turn influence the race. This is the 
natural course. These gods are effects and causes. But it is essential to first 
prove that they are effects, the offspring of the human soul ; if on the 
other hand we admit that they came down from heaven and suffer them to 
domineer over us, they oppress, absorb, and darken history. Such is the 
modern method, most clearly and decidedly. It has recently given its princi- 
ples and its examples. 

f When Rama began the war in the forests against the Spirits that troubled 
the anchorites, she humbly gave him this peaceful advice: "Rama, I have 
been informed that in former times an holy anchorite received in gift a sword. 
Walking with it, the sword suddenly changed his inclinations and gave him a 
taste for blood. From this time he began to kill incessantly." Rama, in the 
name of duty, put aside this excess of prudence. He was not in the least 
intoxicated with the sword, nor excited for blood. 



40 Bible of Humanity. 

able change, she becomes bewildered and for a moment is 
cruel. Seeing a brilliant and lovely gazelle passing with 
hair shining like gold, she exclaimed, " I will have it, I 
will have it." 

What is the matter with her ? What caprice ? It is 
not a taste for blood. Can it be the splendor of this 
soft savage fur with which she desires to make her sweet 
countenance still more charming ? No, for in such a 
climate an adornment like this would be oppressive. She 
thinks of something else, and half says it : " I wish I 
could sit on it. I feel that it would not be right. But I 
desire it. It is one of those desires which will be grati- 
fied at any cost." She covets the gazelle for the purpose 
of making of its skin in the wild cave, her bed, her couch 
of love. 

She is, however, too pure and too simple not to feel 
and confess the reproach which her heart bestows upon 
her. She confesses and afterwards overcomes it, and then 
wishes to deceive herself. She says : " If it would only 
allow itself to be captured, it would serve for our amuse- 
ment." She says this, but does not believe it. We may 
readily imagine that the animal would flee, and only under 
the fatal dart would yield, with its life, to be the object of 
this sensual desire. 

The worst is that this desire is shared. Rama is trou- 
bled, and for the first time in this immense poem he suf- 
fers an angry word to escape him, and says to his brother, 
who wishes to prevent him from killing the animal : ' ' Kings 
can kill with their darts the inhabitants of the woods, for 
the sake of their flesh or for amusement. Everything in 
the forest belongs to the king." 

He hides under this harshness his condescension to his 
beloved, and starts, leaving her to the care of his brother, 
who is commanded not to forsake her. 

For a long time the gazelle eluded him, and caused him 
to wander to a great distance. Sita, thinking that she 
heard his voice, crying for help, exclaimed : " Great God ! 



India. 41 

my husband is in danger ; " and compelled the young 
brother to leave her and go to his rescue. Another sin, 
and yet still of love. Alas ! its punishment is too great. 
She is alone, and feels insecure and weak on account of 
her twofold sin and her fatal delusion. The roebuck was 
the demon, the formidable Ravana, the king of evil spirits, 
and the voice heard was his. He came to her under 
the semblance of a Brahman — a holy anchorite. He flat- 
tered her a-nd tried to entice her, and finally carried her 
to an inaccessible island guarded by the ocean. 

The despair of Rama was unbounded. The brightness 
of his wisdom was obscured. He could no longer see 
clearly. He experienced all the griefs of man, and was 
overwhelmed with the bitter doubts which come in such 
moments. " Alas," he says, "of what avail is it that I 
have always done my duty ! " He had no knowledge 
whatever of his divine parentage, and did not in his ex- 
tremity exclaim : " My Father, why hast thou forsaken 
me ? " The passion of this young god would have been 
deprived of its merit, had he been conscious that he was 
divine or of divine origin. In the poem great pains are 
taken to conceal from him this too consoling mystery. It 
leaves him a man, ignorant of his destiny, uncertain of the 
fate of his Sita, and unable to decide what to do in the 
dark horror of this shipwreck, without one glimmering 
beam in the horizon. 

The season of deluging rains had begun, and the range 
of wild mountains among which Rama has taken refuge 
are overspread with dense clouds. The earth and the sky 
weep. The torrents come down with vehemence. The 
winds moan. All the elements sympathize with the grief 
of Rama. In their mournful compassion he feels still 
more deserted. Where are the parents, the court, and 
the subjects of this son of a king ? His brother has gone 
in quest of assistance ; but the more lonely and desolate 
his situation, the more sympathetic and compassionate is 
nature towards him. All our friends, the animals, that 



42 Bible of Humanity. 

anciently were less disdained, are his friends and approach 
him without diffidence, and hasten to offer him their ser- 
vices. A holy insurrection of all living creatures is begun 
in behalf of him who was so good. Great and sublime 
alliance ! It is one of those elements of faith which man 
found in his heart in the first ages of life.* 

Rama cheerfully accords to these worthy auxiliaries the 
glory of fighting for him ; although, armed with divine 
powers, he could doubtless alone have vanquished all his 
enemies. But it gave them delight to manifest for him 
their zeal, and under him to wage this holy war. It was 
so glorious a boon to be the soldiers of Rama in this holy 
crusade, that they felt themselves by it both honored and 
elevated. 

No Brahman nor holy Rishi in the lonely depths of the 
forest, by prayer or mortification, or by the deep absorp- 
tion, which makes them equal to the very gods, could 
have secured the merits which these simple animals de- 
served by their zeal for Rama, and for the cause of good- 
ness, mercy, and justice. Accordingly in the Ramayana 
the army is open to all. All creatures are enlisted, the 
most fierce and savage, the enormous bears and the gigan- 
tic apes. All can speak, and they display great intelli- 
gence. All are transformed in heart, love, and faith, and 
rush towards the south. Faith removes mountains, and 
subdues and defies the seas. When all this wild multitude, 
at the extremity of Hindustan, sees the threatening waves 
which separate it from Ceylon, it indignantly uproots the 
rocks and the forests and hurls them in heaps into the sea, 
making an enormous bridge, over which the great army 

* India and Persia believe in it. The Shah Nameh, which in modern 
form gives so many ancient traditions, exhibits to us exactly the same picture 
as the Ramayana. In the terrible contest in which its hero is going to engage 
against the evil spirits, all the animals are on his side, and without fighting or 
diminishing the splendor of his victory, they paralyze the enemy by their terrific 
cries, hisses, and roars. The enemy feels himself vanquished beforehand by 
this solemn unanimity of nature, and by her high maledictions, anathemas, 
and condemnations. 



India. 43 

passes with barbarous pomp ; while from below the as- 
tounded and vanquished Indian Ocean looks on. All this 
is history in a dramatic form. We are now sure that 
Ceylon was once connected with the Continent. 

This battle of the good animals fighting for man is like- 
wise historical. It is what really took place and what is 
constantly occurring. In that country, especially, man 
could not have existed without them. 

And now let it be observed that the most creditable 
position is given to the cow, the good nurse of man, 
beloved and honored, which furnished the most whole- 
some nourishment, intermediate between the insufficient 
vegetables and the horrifying animal food — the milk and 
butter, which for a long period was the holy host, and 
which alone, in the great journey from Bactriana to India, 
sustained that primitive people. In the midst of so many 
ruins and desolations, man has lived and will continue to live 
by means of this prolific nurse, which incessantly restores 
to him the earth. 

But many other animals, less beloved and less familiar, 
have served man and still serve him in the twenty different 
wars, which are continually waging in the forests of Hin- 
dustan. Those gigantic forests are peopled at every stage 
of their enormous heights with combatants. At their 
roots the rubbish, which accumulates and ferments, pro- 
creates two most terrible and murderous scourges in the 
form of putrid emanation and vindictive insects. Here no 
life could have been possible without two benefactors 
which are to-day too lightly esteemed. The serpent, a 
hunter of insects, pursues them and catches these vermin 
where the bird cannot reach them ; and the purifying vul- 
ture, the great wrestler with death, forbids death to show 
himself, and unceasingly transforms death, and makes life 
from death. It is an indefatigable agent of the divine 
circulation. A little higher than the roots, among the 
inferior trees and wild vines which adorn this floral cathe- 
dral, death is everywhere. The lion and the tiger are 



44 Bible of Humanity. 

ambushed. It was man's good fortune that in the higher 
regions of these vegetable products he found another aux- 
iliary to aid him. The orang-outang, inoffensive and fru- 
givorous, but of incalculable strength, who playfully twists 
a piece of iron in his fingers, wages against these ani- 
mals an incessant warfare. He arms himself with a branch 
of a tree made into a club, and associates himself with 
others. In groups of three or four they attack and kill the 
elephant (stronger than the lion or the tiger), which would 
deprive them of the fruits of the trees and the sugar-cane. 
The orang-outang is really the Hercules that can fight and 
defeat monsters. Endowed with great agility, alternating 
from air to earth, balancing from the boughs of the trees, 
and flying by daring jumps, he has great advantage over all 
the beasts below. When the tiger with an immense bound 
springs upon the man or dog, the enormous ape, watching 
it from above, leaps like lightning on its head and crushes 
it. This formidable being, when not provoked, has nothing 
hostile in him. In the first songs of the Ramayana, 
we see the orang-outangs passing in troops (as apes do 
to-day) under the leadership of their chief or king. At 
the sight of them, Sita is alarmed, but Rama beckons to 
the chief, and they turn away peacefully on the other 
side. We must not judge of the orang-outang from what 
we see of him to-day. No being more than the ape has 
been scared and perverted by the harshness of man. At 
present we "are horrified by his convulsions and his nerv- 
ousness. He looks as if half mad and epileptic. But in 
the remote times, when man lived with him on terms of 
familiarity, this imitative being was calm and grave, after 
the style of the Hindoos, and became a sedate and docile 
servant. Woman especially exercised much power over 
him, and she could make him the most submissive of 
slaves, if she began to domesticate him while he was yet 
young. 

One thing which charms us in the Rdmayana is that 
even what is fictitious is at the same time true to nature. 



India. 



45 



The apes that fight for Rama are no less true to their 
characteristics, because he is so holy a chief." They are 
genuine quadrumane. gluttons, trifling, capricious, incon- 
stant, libertines, and not over respectful to the limitations 
of Brahmanic interdictions, or the degrees of consan- 
guinity. They are easily annoyed and tranquillized, and 
pass from excessive dejection to high elevation of spirits, 
and are comical, charming, amiable, and without malig- 
nity. 

Hanuman, the favorite, the ape-hero of the Rdmayana, 
most admired on account of his broad shoulders, in his 
devotion for Rama, carries off great mountains on his 
back. Born of the air, conceived of the wind, and some- 
what vain, he desired and dared the impossible ; and he 
is reminded by his strong lower jaw, which is defaced, 
that he had the madness, while still young, to attempt to 
mount to the sun, but having fallen, he and all his race 
have been marked with this deformity. Thus in this 
poem a slight but loving and sympathetic smile is every- 
where interwoven with the great, the holy, and the 
divine. 

We are not to imagine that in this country of light, the 
King of the Demons, Ravana, had the slightest trace of 
the grotesque and vile Devil with tail and horns, the 
ugly creation of the Middle Ages. He is much more, the 
Demon by virtue of his noble and royal beauty, by his 
genius, by his science, and by his grandeur. He reads 
the Vedas. Lanka, his colossal and delightful city, far 
surpasses the Babylons and the Ninevehs. He has a 
wonderful harem, unenclosed and unguarded. All volup- 
tuousness abounds in it. It is his immense attractions, 
and his numerous votaries and friends, which make him 
so dangerous. He is ardently worshipped. He blazes in 
the refulgence of art and the splendors of nature. Beyond 

* We do not find in this poem, as in the awkward legends of the middle 
ages, false animals converted, devoted crows, and penitent lions which be- 
seech for a benediction. 



46 Bible of Humanity. 

all this, he possesses the formidable power of creating by 
magic an adverse and deceptive nature, and also ethereal 
and charming beings, endowed with mischievous faculties, 
which they can exercise at will. 

Rama brings against all this marvellous power only 
simple creatures, rude, wild beings ; nothing but strength 
of heart, goodness, and right. And this will give him the 
victory, and will protect his unfortunate Sita, even in the 
Palace of Ravana. By her calm courage and heroic re- 
sistance she elevates herself to the level of the primitive 
Indian woman, the noble spouse of the era of the Vedas, 
who has been lost to the world for the last one or two 
thousand years. 

Through all these tragical events, Hanuman, the ape- 
hero, is both amusing and interesting. His great heart, 
and his mild virtues, mixed with a little of the ludicrous, 
excite at once to laughter and weeping. It is he who is 
the real Achilles and the Ulysses of this war. He ven- 
tured alone into that terrible Lanka, and the dreaded 
harem, and into the presence of Sita, whom he comforted 
by his tender respect. He did more than any one else 
towards her liberation. After this achievement, Rama 
honored and crowned him. An important event which is 
destined to change nature now occurs. 

In the presence of the two armies ; in the presence of 
men and gods, Rama and Hanuman embrace each other ! 
Let no man again speak of Castes. Indeed, the poem 
henceforth carefully avoids their mention, but in reality 
the barrier is removed and will never more exist. The 
Caste of Beasts is suppressed. How then could any 
human Caste exist? The most debased of men can now 
say : " Hanuman has made me free." Thus is exploded 
the narrow heaven of the Brahmanic religion.* All social 



* If additions have been made to the Rdmayana since the reformation of 
Buddhism, the general outlines, and especially the groundwork of the poem, 
most certainly antedate that reformation ; and I have not the slightest doubt 



India. 47 

distinctions are at an end. The whole world embraces 
amid great rejoicings. In this great day of Grace, can 
there exist any wicked or any damned ? No. The sin- 
ner was a negative being, an absurdity, a misconception. 
He has made expiation ; he has been pardoned. The 
monster was nothing but a covering under which a poor 
soul was imprisoned by a fatal enchantment. This 
stricken soul is delivered and instantly mounts upward; is 
happy, and, in amazement, renders thanksgiving. 

that this poem contributed largely to the abolition of Castes, emancipating 
four hundred millions of men, and founding the largest church on earth. 



48 Bible of Humanity. 



CHAPTER II. 

PERSIA. 

The Earth and the Tree of Life. 

THERE are no Castes among the Persians. In respect 
to religion all are equal.* All are considered and called 
pure. Each is the pontiff of his house and prays for his 
family. They have no temples, no ceremonies, no wor- 
ship, except prayer and exhortation. They have no 
mythology, no imaginative poetry. All is literal, positive, 
grave, and strong. It is energy in holiness. 

Notice a precocious vigor of wisdom and good sense. 
The fire is no more a god, but a symbol, the benevolent 
spirit of the hearth. The animal is not glorified, but be- 
loved and well and magnanimously treated, according to 
its rank in the house and the nature of its soul. 

The law, simple and thoroughly human (above all the 
laws), which Persia has left, which has never been sur- 
passed, which will live forever, and which will always be 
the path to the future, is : heroic husbandry, the courageous 
struggle of Good against Evil, the life of pure light in labor 
and injustice. Hence a code for man and toiler — not for 

* This refers to primitive Persia. Although the texts are confused, we are 
enabled to distinguish three ages — the patriarchal ; that in which the priest 
appears ; and lastly, that in which the Medo-Chaldean Magianism was en- 
grafted over Persia. The Magians were not properly a Caste but a tribe. 
Magianism was not completely organized until after the conquest of Babylon. 
The Greeks did not know Persia until this late and very confused period. I 
take the Avesta solely in that which is most ancient. I adhere very closely 
to the opinion of Burnouf in his Vacua, and in his Researches which correct 
Anquetil. His pregnant conversations have confirmed me. I do not think 
that I have anywhere varied from his opinions. 

The recent German works of Messrs. Hang, Spiegel, etc. , have been admir- 
ably summed up by Michel Nicolas. Revue Germanique, vols. VII. and VIII. 



Persia. 



49 



the idler, Brahman or Monk — not abstinence and revery, 
but active energy, all comprised in this : " Be pure to be 
strong." " Be strong to be creative" 

At midnight, the fire growing dim becomes anxious, 
and awaking the head of the family, says : " Arise, put 
on your clothes, wash your hands, bring the wood to 
make me bright, or the evil spirits will glide in and ex- 
tinguish me." 

He arises, puts on his vestments, and revives the fire 
with its nourishment. The house is made resplendent. 
The prowlers, spirits of darkness, wandering in the dis- 
guise of jackals and adders, will do well to depart. The 
bright spirit of the hearthstone is vigilant, and its host, 
close beside it, is already anticipating the dawn of day, 
and meditating on the work of the morning. The pure, 
the irreproachable fire guards him, his house, and his 
soul, so that he may indulge only in wise, vigorous, and 
generous thoughts. What are these thoughts ? They 
are briefly : 

44 Render to all their rights." 

44 Give to the fire and the earth their natural nourish- 
ment." 

44 Deal justly with the tree, the bull, and the horse." 

44 Be not ungrateful to the dog, and take care that the 
cow does not low against thee." 

The earth has a right to the seed. Neglected, it curses ; 
fertilized, it thanks. It says to the man who cultivates it 
thoroughly : 44 May thy fields yield all that is good to eat ; 
may thy numerous villages abound in all good." To the 
man who neglects it, it says : " May the pure food be far 
from thee, and the demon torment thee. May thy fields 
for nourishment give thee great terrors." 

44 All honor and homage to the earth ! the earth, the holy 
female which supports the man ! It exacts good works. 
Homage to the springs of Ardvi-sura which make the pure 
females conceive and bring forth ! " * 

* Yafna, lxiv. 



50 Bible of Humanity. 

The first of good works is to quench the thirst of the 
earth, to come to its aid, to cause it to bring forth life and 
freshness unceasingly. This is a kind of creation. Persia 
is not, like Egypt, a gift of the Nile.* Its torrents pass 
away rapidly and leave it dry. The earth dries and cracks 
open. It is necessary to search for water with diligence 
and earnestness. It must be evoked from the most obscure 
depths of the mountain and brought to light. This is 
the absorbing thought of man, and the paradise of his 
dreams : to behold the water gushing from the rocks 
and rising from the sterile sand, and see it fresh and 
limpid, coursing and warbling and murmuring. 

And now he says : " I pray and invoke all the waters. 
Come forth ye bubbling springs from the depths of the 
earth ! Ye beautiful nourishing canals ! Ye soft and 
limpid waters, sweetly flowing, which renew the tree and 
purify the desire. Be good and flow gently for us \ " 

The day has dawned. Man arises, and with the iron 
(the short sword, or rather strong dagger, such as may be 
seen on Persian monuments), before the rising of the 
friendly sun, opens and rakes the earth, and makes in it 
the wholesome wound. In this deep furrow he scatters 
the seed. 

All the pure are on the side of man. The eagle and the 
hawk greet him with their first cry at the break of day. 
The dog follows and escorts him. The horse neighs with 
joy. The strong bull with willing heart draws the plough. 
The earth smokes from moisture ; its animating breath is 
the pledge of its fruitfulness. All are in accord. All are 
conscious that man is just and that he labors for their 
good. 

Man is the common conscience. He feels that he is 
engaged in elevated work which invigorates the body, and, 



* Rains are neither heavy nor frequent. There are but few navigable rivers. 
Deserts of salt. A few trees, or rather bushes. Malcolm, Hist, of the 
Persians, vol. I., p. 45. 



Persia. 5 1 

by the co-operation of the forces of nature, nourishes his 
soul. He says most positively, and not without grandeur, 
in the language of good sense, strong and rugged, which 
goes to the point: "He who eats listens better to the 
sacred word. He who does not eat has no strength for 
pure works. He who is famished cannot have robust 
children nor can he be a valiant laborer. Such as it is, 
this world exists by nourishment." 

Elevated by his effective, persevering work, his courage 
increases in the presence of the rising sun, and he says to 
himself: "Dress and sow! He who sows with purity 
fulfills all the law ! He who gives to the earth vigorous 
seed is as much ennobled as if he had made ten thousand 
sacrifices." 

The earth responds : " Yes ! " but in its own language. 
Its answer is in the golden grain of the year. Be patient 
and give it time, and it will respond more and more with 
new, rich, and hardy plants, continually increasing. Al- 
ready as high as man, next season they will be taller. 
Look at that tree in the midst of the field. Rich, abun- 
dant, and grateful, it tenders to man its branches and its 
foliage, it offers him a delightful and longed-for shade at 
noon-day, a tutelary protection from the scorching sky, 
shelter and subsistence without fear. But the sun begins 
to descend ; and man, before renewing his toil, turns to 
his benefactor and says : " Hail, tree of life ! You 
came from the earth ; but whence came I ? From my 
father. But whence the first father ? " This is a profound 
question, which engages his thoughts as he follows the 
plough in the afternoon, and which he answers by the two 
forces with which he is acquainted — the force of youth in 
the tree which is daily renewed, and the force of action, 
the toil of his companion, the ox. Why may not the 
vigorous man come from the ox or the tree ? Inasmuch 
as the tree lives so long, why may it not be the life of 
former times, and the life that is to come ? The tree is 
Immortality. 



52 Bible of Humanity, 

Its sacred name is Homa. Not the fleeting Soma of 
India, the plant fallen from the firmament, which sparkles 
in the fire, mounts joyously to the sky, and nourishes the 
gods. Homa, the robust, solid, firmly-rooted in the earth, 
is the immortal Tree of Life, the strong. In order that 
man may also be strong, he must eat its apples of gold. 
Or, grinding them, he expresses the powerful juice, " the 
liquid which places the soul in the good path." Do not 
imagine that this is mere allegory. It is repeatedly said 
in the law that Homa is eaten, desires to be eaten, and 
inclines his branches that men may partake of his golden 
fruit.* 

The heroes of Persia were the first who ground Homa 
with their glorious hands and made it ferment. After this, 
it foamed, was restless, became audible, spoke, and would 
have made the stones speak. It is the Word itself. 

Supreme miracle among a grave and silent people, 
whose Cyclopean language, unformed, and spare of 
words, is, if we dare say it, an idiom of the dumb.t The 
workman, who all day long toils in the field after the oxen, 
is weary and has need of rest at evening, and requires but 
few words. The Hindoo, in his fluent language has pol- 
ished the Sanskrit, but the silent Persian, out of respect, 
has preserved the old Zend. If this dumb speaks, it is 
Homa that speaks in him. 

Word and light are two identical words in the primitive 
sacred language. % This is not without reason. Light 
is, so to speak, the voice of nature, and the word, in 
its turn, is the light of the mind. The universe hears 
and answers. An eternal dialogue is kept up between 
nature and the soul. If the soul did not translate and 
make luminous the voice of nature, nature would re- 

* Eugene Burnouf : Researches, page 231. {8vo, 1850.) 

t Tnis language, the Zend, singularly harsh, seems to sound like flint, and 

its written characters look like daggers, heads of arrows, wedges and nails. 

Hence the name — Cuneiform. 
\ Burnouf: Yacna, 214. 



Persia. 53 

main in obscurity, uncomprehended, and as if it did not 
exist. 

Homa, the word-light, is the supporter of existence. 
It unceasingly invokes it. It names, one after another, 
all the beings, to assure them of life. Each name is a 
charm to awake and arouse that which would fall asleep 
and return to nothing. 

Such faith is very elevating to man. When the chief 
of a family, arising in the depth of night, while his wife 
and children are sleeping, pronounces before the fire the 
words which vivify the world, this is truly great. What 
will be the importance, the holiness of the man, who feels 
himself so necessary to universal existence! In the silence 
of midnight, and all alone, he feels himself in harmony 
with all the families of the pure, who at this hour also pro- 
nounce the same word of life. 

There were no castes, no magians, no kings, then in 
Persia. The father of each house was the Mage and 
King. He was still more, the conservator of beings, the 
Savior of all life. The extraordinary power which India 
accords to a Rishi, to the great King Vicvamitra, in 
Persia resides in all, even in the lowest laborer. He who 
in the morning, with his hand on the plough, makes the 
earth productive, at night, through the Word, still creates, 
begets the world, the uncertain life of which is suspended 
on his prayer. 

The Combat of Good and Evil. — The Final Restoration 
to Holiness. 

The husbandman is an anxious being, a mind without 
rest, a soul in pain. The shepherd has time for singing 
to the clouds the fantastical victories of Indra. He has 
time to observe in the skies of Chaldea the long journeys 
of the stars. But the Persian agriculturist must, night 
and day, watch, work, and fight. Battle against the earth. 
It is hard and obstinate, and does not yield at one stroke. 
It sells to labor that which we think it gives. Battle 



54 Bible of Humanity. 

against the waters. The delightful waters, so much 
desired, frequently come down violently, laying waste and 
carrying everything away. Sometimes they are suddenly 
exhausted ; drunk up by the sun. It is necessary in 
this climate to protect these daughters of night, (evoked 
from the earth,) from the light, and shelter them in hidden 
canals. A subterranean circulation of infinite work, which 
makes the laborer a miner and a constructor. 

When all this is done, nothing is accomplished. The 
feeble wheat of tender green, the delicate child shoots up. 
It escapes from the protecting womb, betrays itself, and 
sees itself in the midst of enemies. A hundred robust 
and evil plants are there, and will choke it, unless the 
paternal hand comes to wage war against them. A 
hundred devouring beasts come, monsters which man can- 
not repel. What are these ? They are neither lions nor 
tigers, but peaceable flocks. 

It is the shepherd, especially, who is an abomination to 
the laborers. It is against him that the field is guarded. 
The gloomy laborer, with his poniard marks out the 
protective boundary. He excavates a ditch, and planting 
its borders, there grows up a hedge. He fixes the boun- 
dary, and puts down stakes and stones. But this is the 
least that he does. He encloses his field with his word 
and his malediction. Woe to him who trespasses ! 

Eternal war ! we find it everywhere. It is this which 
constituted the divorce between the Hindoo of the Vedas 
and the Persian, the shepherd and the agricultural Aryan. 
The shepherd thinks the appropriation of land odious and 
unjust. He laughs at landmarks and ditches. His animals 
shrewdly make it their sport to leap over them. The 
goats injure the hedge. The cow thoughtlessly passes 
through it. The gentle sheep, in looking innocently for 
its little food, nibbles the sprouting wheat to its roots ; this 
sacred wheat — this dear hope in which the soul of the 
husbandman is absorbed. It is necessary to protect this 
wheat. Day by day the agriculturist becomes more and 



Persia. 



55 



more dreamy and gloomy ; and in these mischievous 
animals, that destroy more than they eat, he thinks he 
sees and denounces the agents of evil spirits, the army 
of wickedness, " of nonsensical caprice," the perverse 
games of magic* 

The Hindoos departed towards the East. But from the 
North quite a different neighbor appeared, the frightful 
Tartar shepherd, an unorganized chaos of Mongols, Cen- 
taur Demons, whose little horses of diabolical instinct, 
make of every field a pasture. It is the accursed empire of 
Turan, eternal enemy of Iran (Persia). These black sor- 
cerers (see the Shah NameJi) go and come like the bat, or 
the night-insect which spoils and disappears. On the 
other hand there comes again and again from the mud of 
the Euphrates, to sleep on Iran the impure Assyrian dragon, 
steady and stupid, the monstrous reptile, which Babylon 
adored, t and which the Persians say lived on human flesh 
only. 

These cruel strifes, which continued through long cen- 
turies, for thousands of years, gave to this people great 
positiveness and a peculiar poetic character. 

They elevated themselves to their sovereign conception, 
the constant contest between the two worlds. On the 



* The movable Indra of the shepherds, who plays on high with the storms , 
the warrior-god whose smile is the lightning, who, in order to give freshness 
to the meadows, hurls down the waters which crush the ripening wheat, seems 
to the agriculturist a cruel magician. He makes of him the demon Andra 
[Andra-inanyas], for whom he does not hesitate to create a hell. The Dae- 
vas, whom the Hindoos revere as gods, likewise become demons. The Persians 
call themselves Vi-Daevas (enemies of the Daevas). To the illusions of these 
Daevas, who are scoffing spirits, this derisive response is given (which appears 
to be a popular song) : " When the field produces, the Daevas hiss {and feign 
to laugn). When the plants bud, they cough. When the straw is tall, they 
weep. When the harvests are gathered, they take to flight. ... In the 
houses filled with the sheaves, the Daevas are severely scourged." {Under 
the scourge which beats out the wheat ? ) 

f Daniel (apocryphal) : " There was a great dragon which they of Babylon 
worshipped." The Avesta records this ascendancy as the dominion of Bobak, 
or rather " the serpent Dahoka, in the reign of Bawri," or Babylon. — Ed. 



56 Bible of Humanity. 

one hand, the holy reign of Iran, the world of Good, the 
garden of the tree of life, the Paradise (garden) ; and on 
the other, the vague, barbarian world of Evil and of un- 
just caprice. -Everything appeared peopled with contrary 
spirits. Between the rough plains of the North, in which 
the demons hiss, and the desert of sand in the South, 
in which the demons breathe forth fire, Persia, with good 
reason, decided that she was the blessed land of works, of 
order, and of Justice. Nor is this justice an idle word, a 
mere play of the fancy. It was a firm purpose, a deter- 
mination to be just. Men sometimes have such moments. 
A celebrated writer (Montesquieu) says that there once 
came to him a quick outburst of conscience, a strong and 
decided desire "to be an honest man." It is precisely 
such a moment that Persia represents in human nature : 
the determination to be just. 

Just to himself in the first place, in opposition to the 
vice peculiar to the laborer, the sordid economy ; just in 
the house towards the humblest and most defenceless ser- 
vant, the animal, for example. " The three pure complain 
of the unjust man who takes no care of them. The plant 
denounces him: ' Be without children, thou who givest 
me not the thing which delights me ' (water). The horse 
says : 'Do not expect that I will love thee and be thy 
friend when thou dost mount me, thou who dost not give 
me the nourishment and the vigor to appear with honor 
in the assembly of the tribe ! ' The cow says : * Be thou 
accursed who dost not render me happy, who dost not 
wish me to be fat except for thy wife and thy children.' "• 

But these three servants belong to his own house. How 
much more difficult to be just away from home ! To be 
just in his own vicinity, with wrangling neighbors, about 
land-marks, etc. Consider that the life of Persia depended 
upon invisible boundaries of waters that ran under the 
earth. How numerous the interests to be respected ! All 

* Anquetil, Avesla, Vol. I., part 2, with corrections of Eugene Bur- 
NOUF. Researches, p. 106. (8vo, 1850.) 



Persia. 57 

are miserly and solicitous of water that is so rare. It is 
easy to divert the water, and the temptation to do so is 
strong. The regular distribution of the water is a proof 
of great honesty. We are struck with admiration when 
we learn from Herodotus that at that time there was an 
immense system, comprising forty thousand canals, run- 
ning in all directions under the ground. Marvellous and 
venerable performance of toil, meritorious life, morality, 
and justice. 

How good is justice, and how rich is its nature ! It 
overflows in humanity like a superabundant spring. Grace 
is begotten of Law. In this Persia, which appears so ex- 
clusive, in which the ties of consanguinity, the purity of 
blood, and the pride of family and of tribe seem to be so 
strong,* the foreigner was not regarded with hostility as 
was the case in Rome. The erring girl, though unknown, 
who is brought back, is protected and guaranteed. " Thou 
shalt seek for her origin, her father, and if he cannot be 
found, thou must report to the chief of the Canton. You 
nourish and regard as sacred the bitch which watches the 
house, and will you not nourish this girl, who is surren- 
dered to you ? "t 

Yes, this was unquestionably the- garden of justice, in 
which flourished the Tree of Life. Men heartily unite in 
the defence of this sacred world, in the great combat of 
Good, which protected this paradise. 

The army of Good, formed in the image of Persia, 
divided into tribes, marched under the leadership of seven 
Spirits, seven chiefs, the luminous Amshapands, whose 
names are those of seven virtues : Science, or the wise 
teacher (Ormuzd),| Goodness, Purity, Valor, liberal Gen- 

* So strong was this feeling that consanguinity was most desired in mar- 
riage. The Persians married not only sisters, but daughters and even 
mothers — Ed. 

f Anquetil : Avesta, II., 394. 

% According to Eugene Burnouf, Ormuzd, Ahura Mazda, does not mean the 
•wise king, as Anquetil believed ; nor the wise Living, as Mr. Bopp believes, 



58 Bible of Humanity, 

tleness, and the Geniuses of Life — producers and vivi- 
fiers. 

The izeds or yazatas, inferior geniuses, the ferouers or 
fravastus (winged souls, guardian spirits) of the just, 
even of the good and pure animals, form the immense 
army of Good. Opposed is the world of serpents, 
wolves, jackals, and scorpions. 

Let us look at the battle in the grand and faithful pic- 
ture which Edgar Quinet, following the text itself, gives 
of it.* 

All beings take part in it. At the extremity of the 
universe, the sacred dog which watches the multitude of 
worlds, terrifies with his fearful bark the detested jackal ; 
the hawk, with his piercing eye, the sentinel of the morn- 
ing, has uttered his cry and fluttered his wings. He 
sharpens his beak for the fierce battle. The horse erects 
himself and paws the Impure with his feet. 

The stars in the sky are divided into two hostile bands. 
But the bird with feet of gold spreads his wings over the 
holy kingdom of Iran. In the desert of Cobi the mon- 
strous serpents with two feet, griffins, centaurs, which 
dart the devouring simoom, snort and hiss in vain. 

The struggle goes on in the very depth of all beings. 
Each has its spirit, its angel. A luminous soul sparkles 
in the diamond. The flower has its guardian angel. 
Everything, even to the dagger, has its ruling spirit — the 
blade lives. All fight, pursue, strike, drive off, and 
wound each other with anathemas and magical incanta- 
tions. In the heights above, the Deva, with bodies of 
brass, and the Darwands, with the folds of serpents, fight 
the white Ferouers, the Amshapands, with wings of gold. 



but the wise teacher. No one can pass grammatically from the Sanskrit 
Asura (living) to the Zend Ahura. Yacna, 77, 81. An important remark, 
which entirely changes the idea which had been formed of the first of the seven 
spiiils. 

* QuiNET : Genius of Religions. This luminous volume formulates in 
burning sentences the profound intimacy between religion and nature. 



Persia. 59 

The shock of their armor resounds and re-echoes. Won- 
derful spectacle, but by no means confused. It steadily 
becomes more and more clear and orderly. The army of 
Good becomes more cautious and united. 

The first of the seven Amshapands, from moment to 
moment becomes more and more conspicuous, dazzling, 
and refulgent. All light centres in him. Night, van- 
quished and constantly diminishing, and more and more 
hotly pressed, flies with Ahriman. Happy religion of 
Hope! Not of inactivity, not of idle expectation, nor 
of sleepy asceticism, but the heroic faith of valiant hope 
which creates that which it expects and wills, and which, 
through labor and virtue, daily diminishes Ahriman, en- 
larges Ormuzd, conquers and merits the unity of God. 

To achieve a divine victory, to make God a conqueror, 
a unique achievement ! Oh ! beautiful deed ! The highest 
of which the soul ever dreamed, and the most efficacious 
to make man grow in holiness. To say to every furrow : 
"I unite myself to the great Workman! I extend the 
field of Good. I circumscribe the field of Death, of 
Evil, of Sterility." To say to the tree planted: " Be 
thou in a hundred years the glory of Ormuzd and the 
shelter of unknown men ! " To say to the springs of the 
mountain, evoked or directed: "Go! may you carry 
life from my fields to yonder tribes, who, not knowing 
whence they come, will say: 'This is the stream of Par- 
adise ! ' " Behold something grand and divine, a high 
society with God, a beautiful alliance, a noble conquest. 
. . . The other retreats, vanquished, disconcerted. 
Ahriman is soon nothing but a black cloud, empty smoke, 
a wretched fog, nay, less, a mere gray speck in the horizon. 

Worth prize of Work ! In the idle Middle Ages, Satan 
constantly grows. A dwarf at first, so small at the intro- 
duction of the Gospel that he hid himself in the swine ; 
in the year 1000 he becomes great, and in the thirteenth 
and fourteenth centuries he was so large that he wrapped 
the world in darkness, and held it under his black shadow. 



60 Bible of Humanity. 

Neither fire nor the sword has been able to subdue him. 
As to the friends of Zoroaster it is precisely the contrary. 
The Gheber, the Parsees, resigned laborers, have, through 
all their evils, believed more and more, that Ahriman, 
tottering, would soon fade and vanish, absorbed in 
Ormuzd. 

From the first, Ormuzd indicated that he was the true 
king of the world, the future conqueror, the only God. 
How ? By his great goodness. He began the war with 
the intention of saving the enemy. He prayed Ahriman 
to be good and to love the good, and to have pity on 
himself. Afterward his indefatigable Grace summoned 
him every moment to reform himself, to convert himself, 
to work out his salvation, to attend to his happiness. 

Jean Reynaud, a man certainly indulgent toward the 
Church, frankly confesses that from Persia to the Church 
of the Middle Ages there has been a strange and terrible 
progress, but it has been in the inverse order. The idea 
of an endless Hell ! Of a God whose vengeance is never 
gratified ! Of a God who imprudently selected for his 
executioner the very person who would most abuse his 
office, the foul spirit,, the Perverse one, who gloats in 
tortures, and finds in them execrable amusement ! As- 
tounding conception, suited to make man cruel, exces- 
sively fond of crime, and which we may call the teaching 
of crime. 

When we reflect how much man is an imitative being, we 
should carefully consider the Divine prototype, which we 
offer to him, and which he will certainly follow. A good 
and merciful God makes men gentle and magnanimous. 
If they fight, they know that it is for the good of their 
enemy. This wicked, who will soon be wicked no longer, is 
less hated from this day ; and will be the good of to-mor- 
row. That the war continues is only a secondary con- 
sideration ; the great, the essential, is the suppression of 
hatred and the subduing of hearts. 

Many great spirits of our day have felt this, and, without 



Persia. 61 

delay, have rallied to this faith, which is evidently the 
true, and is immutable and will endure. " I maintain," 
says Quinet, " that there is not at present an idea more 
living." Every manly heart will rally to it. All at 
morning and evening, without hesitating, will repeat the 
most ancient hymns of the Yaqna (30, 31, 47), on the con- 
version of Ahriman, and of the ultimate unity. 

" Ormuzd, grant me the grace, the joy of seeing him, 
who makes the evil, be brought to comprehend the purity 
of the heart. Grant that I may see the great chief of the 
Darwands, loving nothing but holiness, and forever speak- 
ing the Word among the converted demons ! " 

The Winged Soul. 

" I offer prayer, honor, homage, to pure Law ! Hom- 
age to the Mount of Ormuzd ! (from which descend the 
waters over the earth). Homage to the good spirits, and 
to the souls of my family ! Homage to my own soul ! " 

Who thinks to pay homage to his own soul, to adorn it, 
to embellish it, in himself, and for himself, in the interior 
tribunal ? Who thinks of making it such that it will be the 
image of law, so at one with law that it can do no wrong, 
nothing except what the law authorizes ? This great, 
austere idea constitutes the foundation of the whole social 
structure of Persia. 

No pride. It is the natural relation of Liberty and 
of Justice. 

Persia pursues it through twenty different paths. She 
draws from it her entire system of morals. Let us quote 
a few sentences at random. 

Zoroaster, in his sublime familiarity with Ormuzd, asks 
him: "When does the empire of the demons flourish? 
When do they prosper and grow great ? " " It is when 
thou doest evil." 

Evil is not only the criminal act, but everything that 
mars the original integrity of the soul : indecency or 
license (even in justifiable pleasures), violent and angry 



62 Bible of Humanity. 

words, etc. Profound idea ! Among the grievous sins 
which man always confesses with shame, there is the sin 
of chagrin. To be sad beyond a certain measure, to per- 
mit the soul to fall from its position of firmness and dignity, 
is to injure the state of sovereign beauty in which it must 
at last soar aloft, a virgin with wings of gold. (Fravas/ii.)* 

The more elevated this idea of the soul, the greater 
our wonder, anger, almost indignation, that this heroic 
virgin, which we carry in ourselves, should become weak, 
depressed, and abandoned to sickness and death. Since 
the personality appears so forcible, hence the gloomy 
storm of questions arises which trouble the heart. Death ? 
— What is it ? What signifies this departure which a man 
makes in spite of himself ? Is it a journey ? Is it a fault, 
a sin, a punishment ? If a punishment, what ? What 
must a man suffer ? Will the poor soul in the underworld 
find that which it had here ? What will its nourishment 
and its dress be ? The cold especially troubles it. Over 
the high plateaus of Persia, there are heavy frosts in the 
month of August. t The trouble is profound ; the com- 
passion, the affliction profound. In the festivals of the 
dead, which occur at the end of the year, during ten 
nights the dead are heard speaking among themselves, 
and asking for food and clothing, and to be remembered 
by the living. 

India, in the time of the Vedas, was less embarrassed. 
What was the wish of the dead, who, from the leisure of 
shepherd- life, passed into the leisure of the Eternal ? It was 
to make an immense, free, and uncumbered journey into 
heaven and over the earth ; he would know the moun- 
tains and "the variety of plants ; " he would know the 
depth of the great waves, measure the clouds, and take a 
trip round the Sun. It is the same Sun (Surya), father of 

* Feminine word which we awkwardly translate, in the masculine, 
Feroutr. 

f " The 17th of August," says Malcolm, "there was an inch of ice in my 
tent." 



Persia. 63 

life, who also produces the measure of life, Yama, or 
death — in fact, no death at all— Yama is the law of exist- 
ence. Nothing of gloom in this. This traveller may be 
evoked by his relatives, from the great empire of Yama, 
and occasionally return to see his home. 

In Persia it is entirely different. Death is a positive 
evil. It is by no means a journey voluntarily undertaken. 
It is a defeat, a route, a cruel victory of Ahriman. The 
dead person is one vanquished by a stroke of the wicked 
one, who seeks to consign his victim to night and dark- 
ness, away beyond the kingdom of light. 

This perfidious being, who hates life and labor, is the 
inventor of idleness, sleep, winter, and death. But man 
will not yield to him. He does not think himself defeated. 
On the contrary, the human soul, under the gnawing of 
grief, becomes grander, creates and expands itself into a 
kingdom of glorious light beyond the grave, duplicating 
the empire of Ormuzd. Behold thy victory, O execrable 
One! 

What word is most frequently uttered by the dying man 
near his last gasp ? u Light ! more light ! " 

This eager desire is realized, obeyed. How hard, how 
cruel against nature, if the answer to this utterance were 
to consign him to the dungeon of the sepulchre and the 
black horror of night ! It is that that was feared. Death, 
in its utmost, is regarded as less severe than is the exclu- 
sion from light. 

It is not necessary that the living should here hypocriti- 
cally say, " It is for his honor that we bury him, that we 
hide him in darkness." No, no ; those who truly love are 
not so impatient as to tear themselves thus cruelly from 
their beloved. Love cannot believe in death : it ever 
doubts, even after the lapse of time, and says : "If it 
were false ? " The ancient Persians did not hide the body 
of the beloved one, nor banish him from the day. The 
living did not abandon the dead, but the dead left the 
living. However much altered and changed the form, the 



64 Bible of Humanity. 

family fearlessly accepted the most disagreeable conse- 
quences, providing they could but still see their beloved. 

The dead person was placed before the sun, on an ele- 
vated stone, beyond the reach of the beasts. His dog,* 
his inseparable guardian, which while living always fol- 
lowed him, remained beside the body to watch it. There 
this soldier of Ormuzd, this man of light, who always lived 
on light, continued in its presence at his post, with his 
face uncovered, assured and confiding. 

During two or three days, his relatives, in tears, sur- 
rounded him, to observe and watch. All things go on 
according to the ritual of nature. The sun adopts the 
dead. With his powerful rays redoubled in the mirror 
of the marble, he draws and attracts him up to him- 
self. A process that leaves less than a useless cover, a 
shadow so light, that the children, the widow, the most 
wounded hearts, are quite confident that he is no longer 
there. 

Where then is he ? Above. The sun has drunk the 
body. The bird of the sky has taken the soul. The bird 
was his friend. Through all his labors on earth the bird 
followed him, clearing the furrow. It followed his flock, 
warned him of the weather, and predicted the storm. It 
is the augur, the prophet, the counsellor of man. 

In the long, monotonous work, it pleases him with its 
airy movements. Around the laborer, steady at work, it 
is as a light spirit, another self, more free, who comes, 
goes, flies, and chatters. It would not be astonishing if, 
on the day of the funeral, it came near the dead. And if 
at that moment a luminous ray gilded the bird as it was 
remounting, and transfigured it in the sky, his friends 
exclaimed : " The soul has gone ! " 

Do you know what death is ? To the survivors, it is an 
education, a positive initiation. Man receives from it the 



* The only sacred animal, which, at its death, was honored with funeral 
ceremonies, as it were a man. 



Persia. 65 

sovereign charge, the solemn impression which he pre- 
serves through all his life. At this moment the heart is 
broken, without strength, without nerve, without consist- 
ence, like passive metal, softened by the fire, on which an 
impression is to be made. Death, the heavy coining in- 
strument, falls and strikes. This wretched heart is stamped 
forever. 

Great and terrible difference, whether it is the death of 
bravery which is stamped upon him and gives him its 
noble image — or the death of terrors, the death of servile 
fears, fear of night, fear of evil demons, and fear of being 
buried alive. Alas ! how pale and debilitated the man 
returns from such a funeral ! Made fit only to die like a 
coward and to live like a slave ! Fit subject for a tyrant ! 
The vampires which know how to absorb the soul at 
the moment of its passage when disarmed, are superior 
teachers of cowardice, able practitioners at delivering to 
tyrants the men from whom all heart has been robbed. 
The travelling soul of the Hindoo started with buoyancy 
and without terror, and left no sorrow behind, and more 
than one person would have accompanied it merely 
out of curiosity. The courageous Persian, who recoiled 
not, who still braved Ahriman, and was calm before 
the sun, confided in the light (having always lived the 
worshipper of light), did not, on his departure, leave to 
his relatives and friends, the pitiable legacy of apprehen- 
sion and servility. 

They knew what takes place after death. During three 
days the unsettled soul, guarded by good spirits, and pro- 
tected from the assaults of the bad, hovers around the 
body. After the third night it makes a pilgrimage. 
Encouraged by the brightness of the sun, led by spirits to 
the summit of the mountain Albordj, it sees before it the 
great crossing, the pointed bridge of Tchinevat. The for- 
midable dog which watches the flocks of heaven does 
not oppose its passage. A charming, smiling figure, a 
beautiful girl of light, " vigorous as a youth of fifteen, 
5 



66 Bible of Humanity. 

tall, excellent, winged, pure as the purest thing on earth," 
guards the bridge.* 

"Who art thou? Beautiful! Never have I beheld 
such splendor." "Why, friend, I am thy very life, thy 
pure thought, thy pure converse, thy pure and holy 
activity. I was beautiful. Thou madest me very beauti- 
ful. Behold me, therefore, radiant, glorified before 
Ormuzd." 

The soul admires, is agitated and hesitates, but she 
throws her arms around her neck and tenderly carries her 
away and places her on a golden throne. They are al- 
ready as one. The soul is reunited with itself. It has 
found its true self, its true soul — not fleeting, not in misery 
and illusion — but beautiful, steadfast, and true — above all, 
free, winged, and floating in the beams of light, soaring 
with the flight of the eagle, or penetrating the three 
worlds or paradises with the lightning-like flight of the 
hawk. 

To be just to Persia we must notice the sublime aus- 
terity with which this great conception of the winged soul, 
of the angel is maintained. This angel has nothing of the 
weakness, of the fantastical arbitrariness, which the bas- 
tard ages have more recently mixed with it. It is not the 



* JThordah-Avesta, Fragment 22, Spiegel's: "In that wind comes to 
meet him his own law [the nous of Plato], in the figure of a maiden, one 
beautiful, shining, with shining arms; one powerful, well-grown, slender, 
with large breasts, praiseworthy body ; one noble, with brilliant face, one of 
fifteen years, as fair in her growth as the fairest creatures. 

"Then to her speaks this soul of the pure man, asking, ' What maiden art 
thou whom I have seen here, O fairest of maidens in body ? ' 

" Then replies to him his own law : * I am, O youth, thy good thoughts, 
words, and works, thy good law, the own law of thine own body ; which 
would be in reference to thee like in greatness, goodness, and beauty, sweet 
smelling, victorious, harmless, as thou appearest to me. Thou art like me, 
O, well-speaking, well-thinking, well -acting youth, devoted to the good law, 
so in greatness, goodness, and beauty, as I appear to thee. Thou hast made 
the pleasant yet more pleasant to me, the fair yet fairer, the desirable yet 
more desirable, the one sitting in a high place to be sitting in a yet higher 
place in these paradises." — Ed. 



Persia. 6j 

blonde son of Grace, a Gabriel, a deserved confidant, with 
whom we make bargains, whom we may hope to soften, 
and whose peculiar indulgence can dispense with your 
justice. The winged virgin, which is the angel of Persia,' 
is justice itself, is the law which thou hast made to thyself j 
the exact expression of thy works. 

Great poetry ! but of profound reason ! The more it 
is severe and wise, the more is it also probable.* It is for 
this life on earth the noblest emancipation. In its pres- 
ence man finds himself highly elated and lifted up. He 
feels as if wings were growing out of him. All the lower 
world appears as a beginning. Innumerable worlds, and 
a far-reaching view opens before him into the infinite of 
heaven. Man occasionally gets such a glimpse, but it is 
so bright that it causes his eyelids to close. Obscurity is 
made by the vividness of the light. Man remains dumb. 
Is he rejoicing or sad ? 

The Eagle and the Serpent. 

If anything in any country attracts the attention of the 
laborer over his furrow, and arrests his plough, it is the 
sublime and fantastic spectacle in the heavens which out- 
lines the strife of the bird and the serpent ; a savage con- 
flict in which both are frequently wounded. It is not 
without experiencing the tooth and venom that the eagle, 
crane, or stork, captures the dangerous reptile. Man 
mentally takes part with them in the combat. The strug- 
gle is uncertain. Sometimes the bird appears to falter at 
the vigorous blows of its convulsed antagonist. The 
sharp, pointed, violent zig-zags which the lightning traces 
in the clouds describe the contortions of the black serpent 
in the sky. But the bird does not let go its hold of its 
captive. They mount into the air. They are scarcely 

* The strong, touching, penetrating book on this subject is the Immor- 
tality, by Dumesnil, the product of a situation full of death, full of life. 
Life overflows in it. It is more than a book, for he wrote it for his own 
comfort, pro remedio animee. 






68 Bible of Humanity, 

distinguishable. The eagle carries away its prey into the 
profound depths of heaven and disappears in the light. 

The bird most appropriately appertains to Persia. It 
hails the return of the day. It looks and longs for it as 
much as the serpent avoids it. Persia venerates the bird, 
and aspires to its free and elevated life. In the eagle, 
she recognizes herself; while in the serpent she personifies 
and denounces her foes, both of Turan and of Assyria.* 

Although the mytht is often a spontaneous product of 
the soul, quite independent of history, we are disposed to 
believe that, among the Persians, who were far less imagi- 
native than the Greek or the Hindoo, there was for it a 
basis in history. The Persians say that there came to 
them from the West, probably from Assyria, a scourge, 
the invasion of the monster Zohak, having on his shoul- 
ders serpents famishing for human flesh. This haughty 
Persia, this eagle, became the slave of the serpent, and 
endured a servitude more cruel than that of Judea. The 
Assyrians, according to Daniel, worshipped the living 
dragon, concealed in the lowest part of the temple. 

By the Euphrates, the Ganges, the Nile, and still more 
in Guinea, boiling with humid heat, in the countries which 
insects at times make uninhabitable, the serpent is the 
friend of man. These insects are so terrible that the 
chamois and the elephant flee before them from one 
extremity of Africa to the other. The hunter of insects 
is blessed. It brings peace and fertility. It is subtle, 
prudent, and wise. But to understand what it says, the 
fine, delicate ear of woman is necessary. The negroes of 
Guinea, who have not changed any more than Africa her- 



* In the Khordah-Avesta, the Assyrian power is personified as " the snake 
Dahaka, with three jaws or heads, in the region of Bawri," or Babylonia. 
The Medes and Armenians also commemorate it under the names of Dahaka 
or Deiokes, and of As-dahaka or Astyages. Turan or Tartary appears to 
have been signified by "the great Serpent," which devastated Aryana-vaeja, 
Avesia, Fargard i. — Ed. 

f The Aryan migrations, indicated in the first Fargard of the Avesta. 



Persia. 69 

self for the last ten thousand years, or longer, annually 
commemorate the marriage of the woman and the serpent. 
The maiden given or consecrated to the serpent becomes 
extravagantly attached to it and utters oracles. Thus 
came a whole world of fables in Greece, in Judea, and 
everywhere, about the seductions of the serpent, its 
amours, which occasionally afforded a view of the future, 
and opened its mysteries, sometimes resulting in the be- 
getting of a divine son.* The conception is altogether 
different in dry, elevated countries, such as the high plains 
of Persia, where insects are less numerous. Here the ser- 
pent is the adversary, and excites dread and horror, even 
when it cowers down in winter in a corner of the stable, 
utterly defenceless. Its wave-like motions, its spiral coil- 
ings, its strange changes of skin, its cold scales, everything 
is repulsive. Among the animals it is the treacherous 
one ; to-day torpid, to-morrow hissing and furious. It 
frightens beyond its real power of hurting. Its form is 
imagined in everything which causes terror. In the cloud 
— the serpent of fire — which, hurled from on high, dashes 
to pieces and kills. In the torrent — the foaming dragon — 
which, unexpected, launched by the storm, rushes from 
the mountain and devastates with incredible swiftness the 
fields, the gardens, and the flocks. 

We can form some idea of the horror which Persia had 
for the crawling god, and her mortal disgust for the ob- 
scene fables of the Ethiopian f world, the impurities of 
Assyria under the corrupting power and the fascinations 
of the serpent. The abhorrence was rendered complete 
by the exaction of a tribute of children for the insatiable 
Babylonish monster to devour. Among this simple, agri- 
cultural people, the strong man who delivered them was a 

* V. Collected Texts, by Schwartz. Ur sprung der Mythologie. 

\ Ethiopia anciently embraced the whole country occupied by the Hamitic 
race. India, Beluchistan, Caramania, Susiana, Arabia, Syria, Asia Minor, as 
well as Northern Africa, were comprised in its boundaries ; everywhere, the 
serpent was worshipped. — Ed. 



jo Bible of Humanity. 

smith. His coarse leather apron became the glorious ban- 
ner of emancipation. The dragon crushed on the anvil 
by the powerful iron hammer writhed and writhed again ; 
its sharp tail, its hideous head, its scattered joints were 
never re-united.* 

Assyria is divided ; she has two heads, Nineveh and 
Babylon ; while Persia, on the contrary, becomes more 
firmly bound together. The tribes of Persia are a people 
of fire, a conflagration in march, who wish to purify every- 
thing, and to subdue everything to the light. We feel 
this new spirit in a prayer to H6ma, a very blast of 
trumpets, which sounds a religious conquest, a purifying, 
puritan, iconoclastic propaganda, in which all the people 
are soon involved. 

" Golden Homa, give me energy and victory. Grant 
that I may go courageously ; that I may march over the 
countries, triumphing over the hateful, and striking down 
the cruel. Grant that I may conquer the fury of all, of 
men, of devas, of deaf demons, of murderous animals, of 
wolves with four legs, and of the army of terrible troops 
which run and fly." f 

The world is changed. Persia is strong. She is going 
to overflow. The peaceful, the pure, have taken the sword 
for the defence. They have identified themselves with 
war. The first Amshaspand has become Ormuzd, the 
King of Heaven, against Ahriman, the King of Darkness. 
The peaceful have elected a King of the Earth, who rallies 
the tribes ; and seems the great Ferouer of Persia, her 
brilliant soul. This winged soul flies to war ; is about to 

* Persia for three or four thousand years commemorated her smith in songs. 
She made work honorable, and was not ashamed of it. In her great poem 
of national tradition, Gustasp, her hero, who is going to see the Empire of 
Rome, finds himself without resources. In this Babylon of the West, what 
would Roland have done ? What would Achilles and Ajax have done ? Gus- 
tasp is not embarrassed. He offers himself to a smith. But his strength is 
too great. With his first stroke he splits the anvil in twain. 

f Eug. Burnouf: Asiatic Journal, August, 1845. Vol. 4, 148; Re- 
searc/ies, 241. 



Persia, Ji 

march over the countries and purify Asia with the sword 
of fire. 

The impious Babylon, with her dragon-god, cannot 
stop her. She hastens towards Egypt, and falls plump 
upon the blacks of Africa, sworn enemies of light. She 
menaces the pale West. To arrest her furious career will 
require no less than Salamis. 

u History," says Quinet, "has put itself in march." 
We feel it on the bas-reliefs of Persepolis, in which the 
Persian conquerors appear in long files. We hear the 
noise of their tread. But this review is speechless. They 
pass, and have uttered nothing. The history of this people 
of light remains obscure to us. 

Their monument, the Avesta, a simple collection of 
prayers, and a ritual, is as a heap of the remains of a great 
shipwreck. 

Suppose that a book like the breviary, mass, and ves- 
pers, inverted, survived the extinction of Christianity, with 
the confused mixture (Jewish, Greek, Roman, Christian) 
of religions, of different societies which offer such compila- 
tions, — it would not be a bad resemblance of the Avesta. 
The magianism of the Medes and Chaldeans confuses 
utterly at every instant the true spirit of the primitive 
Iran. 

The Avesta y however, still contains the principal 
stream. The remainder is accessory. The Jews, disciples 
of Persia, the Greeks, her enemies, offer us but subsidiary 
information. The Greeks see in Persia only a confused 
Chaldean mixture, frequently attributing to her either the 
glory or the shame, the science, or the corruption, of 
Babylon, her adversary. 

Had Babylon swallowed Persia ? Was she drowned, 
lost in the immensity of that conquest ? Conquered in 
her turn, humiliated by the strong Greek genius, and by 
Alexander the Great, had she abjured and abandoned 
herself? We might have believed this, were it not that 
under the Sassanides she was found again immovable in 



72 Bible of Humanity. 

her faith, more Zoroastic than ever. The fall of the Sassa- 
nides and the successive conquests made no change in her 
belief, and could not. She maintained under each empire 
the holy Soul and the identity of Asia ; preserving herself 
not only in her ascendancy over her sons, the poor and 
honest Ghebers or Parsees, but especially, and still more 
in her indirect ascendancy over the Mussulmans, her con- 
querors, and over the innumerable tribes, the Sultans and 
the Dynasties of every race which passed over her. Dur- 
ing their short stay, however, the barbarians had abundant 
time to render homage to this superior soul, to know its 
tradition, to become imbued with it, and to embody it. 
The Turkomans from the North, the Arabians from the 
South, left their recitals and their legends on the threshold 
of Persia, as the reverential pilgrim deposits his shoes at 
the entrance of the mosque. They enter, take the great 
antique soul, its songs, and its poems. They sing nothing 
but the Shah Nameh. 

The Shah Nameh. — The Strong Woman. 

The holy soul of Persia, under all the floods of barbari- 
ans, had preserved itself in the earth as living water, which 
flows fresh and pure in the obscure depths of forgotten 
canals. Towards the year one thousand (after Christ) 
there made his appearance one who was imbued with the 
ancient spirit and worship of the sacred fountains. All 
were reopened to him, rich as ever, murmuring, eloquent 
of antique things which had been considered lost. 

It is not from caprice nor by accident that I have drawn 
this comparison of the waters. It is really because these 
very waters, which made the country, made the poet also. 
They were the first inspiration of Firdusi. 

The waters which hide and show themselves, lose and 
find themselves, which, sometimes obscure and nocturnal, 
come again to light, and say in murmurs : ' ' Here we are " — 
are certainly not persons, but they have the appearance of 
souls — souls which were or will be, which await organiza- 



Persia. 



73 



tion and prepare it. A country entirely engrossed by 
them, in their evokation, in their distribution, in their de- 
partures, in their returns, was by this alone led to dream 
of the soul, of its births and re-births, and to hope in im- 
mortality. 

Firdusi was born a Mussulman. His father owned a 
field near a stream and a dry canal. The child went daily 
alone to meditate by the old canal. This ruin of ancient 
Persia was eloquent in its silence. The old canal was for- 
merly the life of the country. The water, abandoned to its 
caprices, now exhausted and now overflowing, was often 
the scourge of the country. The ancient Paradise of Asia, 
the garden of the tree of life, whence flowed the rivers of 
heaven, health, freshness, fertility; this Persia, what had 
she become ? The contrast was very great. In a very 
small canton there remained twelve thousand aqueducts,* 
abandoned and dilapidated, to glorify the ancient period 
and condemn the present. Sluggishness and pride made 
the conquerors despise the sacred arts of the Zoroastrian 
times. Everything was becoming desert, salt, sands, 
pestiferous marshes. As is the earth, such is man. The 
condition of the family is that of the country. It was 
languishing, desolated, and sterile in the miserable harems 
of the Mussulmans. 

The genius of the place spoke ; the soul of the country 
awakened in the child. In the true spirit of a Gheber, a 
feeling altogether Zoroastrian, he said to the canal : 
" When I shall be a man, I will make a dam in the river, 
and a dyke, and then thou wilt no longer be thirsty." 

More and more attached to Persia, he listened, collected, 
and wrote out its ancient traditions without being intimi- 
dated by the execrations which Mohammed had hurled 
against Fire-Worship. From his sixteenth year he began 
to sing them, scan them, and consecrate them in poetic 
measures. Out of peculiar respect, which poets so rarely 

* Malcolm, p. 6. 



74 Bible of Humanity. 

feel, he continued faithful to the old narrations, which 
came to him out of the depths of centuries. The transla- 
tor, Mr. Molh, in his beautiful introduction to the Shah 
Nameh, remarks that Firdusi by no means floated in the 
hazard of the fancy. " Even his faults," he says, " prove 
that he followed a marked path, from which he would 
not deviate." This was of advantage to the poem. His 
persons are not simply transparent shadows. They have 
: a character singularly real. Whoever has read his Gustasp 
and his Rust am, for instance, has seen them face to face, 
and can draw their pictures. 

Who could have believed that this immense and powerful 
work would come down through so many misfortunes, from 
the waves of barbarisms, active and violent, which have 
passed over the ancient world ? How on a bed so troubled 
will roll this renewed river of ancient days ? Can it be 
other than corrupted, surcharged with varied elements 
either coarse or subtle ? (Another mark of barbarism.) 
No matter ! How noble this river ! How high its source, 
and how impetuous ! How grandly it flows, and with 
what a sublime purpose ! 

There is a mystery underlying this, which has not been 
explained. How this Mussulman, this member of the 
conquering race, found at the hearth of* the Parsees such 
astounding confidence that they gave to him their heart, 
and disclosed the tradition of their country ? It must have 
been the powerful attraction of the heart of the poet, the 
child-man, to whom they could refuse nothing. Imbued 
with the spirit of ancient Persia, for sixty years he glori- 
,fied her soul, and this soul, thus enchanted, came to him. 

It happened, by singular good fortune, that everywhere 
under the conquerors, the chiefs of the native families had 
held, with the patriarchal life, the precious deposit of the 
ancient past. Even a special name, as a historical priest- 
hood, was assigned to them. They were called history 
cultivators. At the hearth in the evening, with closed 
doors, Persia came back, the ancient shadows, the naive 



Persia. 75 

but sublime dialogues of Ormuzd and Zoroaster, the ex- 
ploits of Yima or Jemshid, of Gustasp and of Isfendiar, 
the apron of the smith who was of old the savior of the 
country. The mothers especially perpetuated the tradi- 
tions. Woman is tradition itself.* More learned in 
Persia than elsewhere, she exercised very great influence 
in the land. At the hearth she was the queen and mis- 
tress, and to her son she was as the living God. The son 
was never permitted to sit in the presence of his mother. 
The queen-mothers, Amestres, Parisatis, appear to have 
reigned under their sons. In the Avesta, as we have seen, 
the Angel of the Law is a woman. The soul of the just 
is expressed by the feminine word Fravascki. The ideal 
of purity is not only the infant girl, and the virgin, but the 
chaste and faithful spouse. t 

*In Western Asia and Europe the Great Mother was worshipped at the 
Thesmophonia as the institutor of civil society. — Ed. 

f This is in antagonism to the doctrine of the Jew and the Mussulman. 
Woman, among the Jews, was the cause of the apostasy, and does not recover 
from it. The Arabian woman (see Burkhardt, etc.), adventurous and 
romantic, descended from bad to worse, each husband being permitted to 
divorce her by the gift of a camel. The Persian maid and wife, on the con- 
trary, are the objects of religious respect. " I pray to, I honor the holy soul 
of the girls who are marriageable ; of the girl of prudence, of the girl of 
desire (pure desire), of the holy girl who does good, of the girl of light." The 
betrothed maiden, that at least who is no longer regarded as a child, must 
be consulted and consent to the marriage. If after marriage she remains 
sterile, she can authorize and introduce another wife. ! The spouse must be 
gentle ; every morning she must offer herself to her husband, and repeat nine 
times, " What dost thou wish ? " (Anquetil, Avesta, II., 561. ) The husband 
must not neglect her, and every nine days, at least, must render to her his 
duties. 3 The Persian contracts marriage without hesitation, and respects 
its obligations. He believes that if marriage is holy, all that relates to it is 
holy. The chaste and faithful spouse is devoted to him, and ardently renders 



1 This explains the story in the Hebrew scriptures, of Sarai, in the book of Genesis, who 
having no children gave Hagar, the Egyptian, her maid, to Abram to be his wife ; of Rachel, 
who gave her maid Bilhah to Jacob ; and doubtless of Elkanah, the father of Samuel, who 
had two wives, " Peninnah who had children, and Anna who had no children." Much of 
the bigamy that is now practised in the East is for a like motive — to rear children by the 
prolific spouse, to overcome the reproach of the barrenness of the other. The Hebrew story 
was doubdess inspired by the Persian custom. — Ed. 

3 The laws of Solon contained the same provision.— Ed. 



j 6 Bible of Humanity, 

Firdusi does not even allude to the Moslem women who 
are bought, sold, and made captives. He pictures only 
the Persian women. The heroines in his book, faithful to 
the true traditions, have an antique dignity and grandeur. 
If they sin, it is not through weakness. They are very 
austere and valiant, bold in initiative, and of heroic 
fidelity. One of them, instead of being carried away, 
carries off her sleeping lover. They fight by the side of 
their husbands, and brave every peril. We already see 
among them the Briinhilda of the Niebelungen, the ideal 
of the strong virgin who subdues man, and who, on the 
night of marriage, binds and enchains her husband. But 
all this is lofty and pure. There is no corrupt ambiguity, 
no ridiculous, obscene plot, as that which the Minnesingers 
have put in their famous Night. But that which is far 
more beautiful than this rude ideal of strength is the con- 
jugal heroism, of which Firdusi delighted to multiply the 
models. He greatly admired the daughter of the Empe- 
ror of Roum, who was persecuted by her father, because 
she had married the hero Gustasp, whose sufferings and 
glorious poverty she shared. He also admired the daugh- 
ter of Afrasiah, King of Turan, the great enemy of 

her duty, and, thus doing, preserves her supreme virginity of soul. "A ma- 
gician, arriving with seventy thousand men, said he would destroy the town 
if no one could answer his questions. A Persian presented himself. 

" Tell me what a woman loves." 

" That which delights her — the love of her marriage duty." 

"Thou liest! that which she loves most is to be the mistress of the house 
and to have beautiful clothing." 

*' I do not lie. If you doubt, ask your wife." 

The infidel, who had married a Persian woman, presumed that she would 
not dare speak the truth. He commanded her to be conducted to him, and 
interrogated her. She remained silent ; but finally, constrained to speak, 
fearing that the town would be destroyed, and that she would go to hell, she 
asked for a veil, covered herself, and spoke thus : 

"It is true that a woman loves dress, and to be the mistress of the house, 
but without the union of love with her husband, all this good is nothing but 
evil." 

The magician, indignant at her courageous freedom, slew her. Her soul 
ascends to heaven, saying — "I am pure, most pure!" 



Persia. jj 

Persia, who having taken for her husband a young Persian 
hero, defended him, nourished him, saved him. When 
the cruel Afrasian, in order to prolong his sufferings, 
sealed him, alive, under a stone, she begged food for his 
support. Noble image of devotion, which no history, no 
poetry, has ever surpassed ! He was at length released. 
His glorious spouse accompanied him to Persia. She 
triumphs, is worshipped, carried in the heart of the 
people. 

A political accident favored Firdusi. An intelligent 
chief, Mahmoud the Gaznevide, having become the ruler ot 
Persia, thought that, in order to enfranchise himself from 
the Calif of Bagdad, it was necessary to make an appeal 
to local patriotism. He made a strange coup d'etat. 
Although a Mahommedan, he proscribed the dialect of 
Mahommed, forbad the use of the Arabic language, and 
adopted the beautiful Persian, mingled with so many an- 
cient words. He founded a new empire on the idea of 
this renaissance, expecting that through this language the 
people would revive their remembrances of their heroes. . 
But in order to give to this language its rhythm and the 
popular charm, an inspired poet was necessary. At this 
juncture Firdusi was found. The monarch's enthusiasm 
for the poet knew no bounds. He named him " the poet 
of Paradise." * He wished to load him with gold. Firdusi 
refused, not wishing to be paid till he had completed the 
poem ; so that he could erect the dike, retire to his canal, 
and, having become old, could see his native fields fer- 
tilized anew with fresh waters. 

Mahmoud lodged him in his own palace, and caused a 
kiosk to be erected for him in his gardens, into which no 
one could enter except A'iyar, the favorite of the Sultan. 
On the walls of this pavilion were painted the battles and 
the heroes which the poet was to render immortal. Fir- 
dusi in his solitude had not only the nightingales, but also 

* This is the meaning of Firdusi. 



yS Bible of Humanity. 

a young musician, a literary friend, whose graces as well 
as his lute, awakened his genius. 

In the course of this long labor things changed strangely. 
Mahmoud, having nothing now to fear from the West, 
invaded India and despoiled the pagodas of their treas- 
ures. Rapacious and fanatical, he broke open statues 
of idols filled with diamonds. On account of his re- 
actionary movement the envious took advantage of him. 
A thousand slanders were circulated. One day he was 
described as a schismatic, another day as a Gheber, and 
finally as an atheist. Although master of the palace, his 
subjects were forgetting his rank, and even neglecting to 
supply his commonest wants. 

Firdusi, now upward of sixty years of age, had lost his 
son of thirty-seven, to whom he had looked for support. 
His work and life pressed him heavily. His poem was 
far from completion. He had almost reached the trying 
and delicate part of his poem, the epoch in which the 
hero Gustasp received from Zoroaster the ancient worship, 
adopted it, and imposed it on the whole earth. What 
could the poet do ? Would he confess his respect for this 
worship ? Would he stand by Gustasp and Ancient Persia 
at the moment when his master, the dreadful Mahmoud, 
was becoming again a zealous Mussulman? Severe moral 
struggle ! He felt his restraint. His kiosk, his beautiful 
gardens, what were they but the iron cage of the poor 
dog in the vicinity of the lion? Hear his story: "The 
gloom was black as jet. The night was without stars, in 
an air which seemed to be of rust. I felt on every side 
Ahriman. At every sigh he heaved, I saw him as a fright- 
ful negro, blowing over blackened coals. Black was the 
garden ; the brook, the sky, were immovable. Not a 
bird, not a beast. No word either good or bad. Neither 
height, nor depth, nothing distinct. My heart, little by 
little, was closing. I arose and descended into the gar- 
den, where my friend came and found me. I asked him 
for a lamp. He brought it, with wax-candles, oranges, and 



Persia. 79 

pomegranates, wine and the shining goblet. He drank 
and played the lute. An angel charmed me, soothed me, 
and made the night into day. 

"He said, ' Drink ! I will read an history.' 

M ' Yes,' I replied. ' My dear friend, slim as the cypress ! 
and sweet-looking as the moon ! Relate to me the good 
and the evil which fills heaven with contradictions.' 

"'Hear, then! This history, which thou wilt put in 
lines, is taken from the old Pehlvi book.' " 

Wine, the liquor hated by the Arabian apostle, but 
blessed by the Persians, now reinvigorates his heart. I 
think this song is the best in the Shah NamcJi. He assures 
us in vain that he has taken it from the old Gheber poet 
Dakiki, his predecessor. He vainly maintains that this 
song is not worth a farthing. No one believes him. He, 
himself, having finished it, lets drop this sentence of pro- 
found joy : 

" Behold the world and its revolutions. The empire is 
without a representative. It wavers ; he who holds it is 
weary of it. . . . Do not sow evil; as much as possible 
avoid it. Pray to the Lord, the only God, to permit thee 
to live on earth long enough to finish this book in thy 
beautiful language. After its completion, let thy mortal 
body return to dust, and let the eloquent soul go to the 
holy Paradise ! " 

The bigoted Mussulmans rejected Firdusi. The Parsees 
boldly took him for one of themselves. Mahmoud, 
indisposed, devout through avarice, allowed himself to be 
advised to perfidy, and sought to pay in silver pieces 
what he had agreed to pay in gold. Firdusi, when in the 
bath, saw the favorite A'ryar approaching with sixty thou- 
sand pieces of silver. Without complaining he gave a 
third part to the messenger, another third to the bath 
tender, and the remainder to the slave who brought him 
drink. At this Mahmoud was so enraged that he wished 
to crush him by the elephants. Firdusi mollified his 
anger, but resolved to fly. Poor, after so many years of 



80 Bible of Humanity. 

profitless labor, with the staff of a traveller, the garb of a 
Dervish, he set out alone. No one accompanied him, or 
came to bid him farewell. He left to Afyar a sealed 
paper, to be opened after twenty days, by which time 
Firdusi expected to be beyond the territory of the Gaz- 
uevide monarch. The paper was found to contain a dar- 
ing satire, in which the poet said to Mahmoud : 

" Son of a slave, hast thou forgotten that I also have 
a sword which pierces, which can wound and shed blood ? 
These lines which I leave to thee will be thy portion in 
all coming centuries, while I will give shelter and safety 
to a hundred men more worthy than thyself." 

Nevertheless, it was a serious affair to have such an 
enemy, who pursued him, claimed him, and demanded 
that he be delivered to him. Under this terror the unfor- 
tunate man wandered in disguise. He was eighty-three 
years old when Mahmoud, near death and the judgment, 
desired to atone and make reparation. He sent to 
Firdusi the promised gold. Its bearer entered through 
one gate into the town in which Firdusi had just died, 
while his funeral cortege was passing out of another. It 
was proffered to his daughter, who nobly refused it. His 
sister accepted it, but only to fulfil the vow of his infancy, 
to execute his will, build the dike which he had promised 
to the old canal, and which was to bestow upon the canton 
new life and fertility. 

Is this a digression ? A thoughtless reader would be 
tempted to say so. But it is quite the contrary ; it is the 
basis of the subject ; it is its soul. This soul of Persia, 
primarily evoked by the mystery of the waters which 
created the country, returns obstinately three thousand 
years after Zoroaster, and contrary to all expectation, the 
soul revives the Mussulman's spirit and floods it with its 
abounding goodness and its rich inspiration. 

The torrent of legends in the heroic Sagas had always 
flowed through the popular voice, but was covered and 
darkened by magianism. Ceremonies and purifications 



Persia. 81 

were held in higher estimation than the history of heroes. 
The conquest and obliteration of magianism were neces- 
sary in order that the Mussulmans themselves, in their 
sterility, should search under the ruins for the hundred 
thousand disappeared canals of the heroic life, and that a 
genius should reunite them in this immense river of poetry 
1 which carries them into eternity. 
6 



82 Bible of Humanity. 



CHAPTER III. 

GREECE. 

The Intimate Relation between India, Persia, and Greece. 

The three Hearths of light, India, Persia, Greece, shone 
separately, without reciprocal reflection, without com- 
mingling, almost without knowing each other. This was 
necessary, in order that each should freely accomplish its 
mission, and impart what it contained. 

The beautiful mystery of their intimate relation, opened 
by the Vedas in the mystery of dogma, is simple. Here 
it is formulated for the first time in all that is essential. 
The Veda of the Vedas, the Indian secret, is this . " Man 
is the oldest of gods. The hymn originated everything. 
The word created the world." 

" The word supports it," says Persia. " Man watches, 
and his word continually evokes and perpetuates the flame 
of life." 

" Fire carried off from Heaven itself, and in spite of 
Zeus," adds the bold Greece. "This torch of life which 
we in running pass to each other, was lighted by a genius 
and given to man in order that he might produce art ; 
make himself a creator, a hero, a god. Hard work ! 
No matter. Though in Prometheus a prisoner bound, 
in Hercules he mounts to Heaven." Behold the real 
identity of the three brothers, their common soul, veiled 
in the former two, and blazing in the third. 

Whatever was the interior unity, it was essential to the 
freedom of mankind that it should not be perceived till a 
later period, so that Asia, already old (500 B.C.), should 
not stifle Greece, and that Persia, transmuted by the Chal- 
dean intermixture, should not impose on Greece her confu- 



Greece. 83 

sion. It had come to her in the impure cortege of Babylon, 
of the Phoenician Moloch, of the foul Anaitis, whose infa- 
mous altar Artaxerxes everywhere erected near the Altar 
of Fire. 

The great event in this world, incomparably, is the 
victory of Salamis, the eternal victory of Europe over 
Asia. This was an event of immense consequence, before 
which everything disappears. We read of it over and 
over again without satiety. Platea, Marathon, Salamis, 
always delight and draw out the same outburst of joy ; 
not without cause. It is our birth. 

" Our minds become exalted," as says the Cid. It is the 
epoch of the birth of the European mind, or rather of the 
human mind in its sovereign liberty, and in its strength of 
invention and criticism. Spiritual savior of the world : its 
victory over Asia assured the light by which Asia herself 
was illuminated. 

Greece, so small, has done more than all the empires. 
With her immortal works, she has given the art which 
makes them, especially the art of creation, of education, 
which makes men. 

She is the Instructress of Peoples. This is her great 
name. 

Such was the strength of life in her that, two thousand 
years after the long age of lead, a light shadow, a distant 
reflex of Greece, was enough to produce the renaissance. 
What was left ? A mere nothing. This trifle threw into 
the shade, subordinated, and eclipsed everything. 

This little was necessary. Some scattered fragments, 
some worm-eaten sheets, some trunks of statues are 
excavated from the earth. Humanity shudders. With 
both hands humanity embraces the marble torso. Hu- 
manity has again found herself. This is more than any 
work ; it is the heart, the strength, the power which 
comes back ; it is the boldness and the liberty, the free 
inventive energy. 

The true genius of Greece is transformation, education. 



84 Bible of Humanity. 

It is the magician, the great master of metamorphoses. 
Mankind surrounds and laughs. " It is a sport," say the 
people; "an enchantment. It is an amusement of the 
eyes." Afterwards, they gradually perceive that this 
cycle of varied forms, in which men and gods appear, is a 
profound education. 

Nothing is hidden. All is luminous. Nothing takes 
place behind the scenes, in the gloomy crypt. Every- 
thing is done in the open air, before the sun, in the broad 
light of the palestra. This beautiful genius is neither ava- 
ricious nor jealous. The doors are wide open. Approach 
and contemplate. Humanity will perceive how humanity 
forms itself. 

How came about the generation and the education of 
the gods in the thousand years of poetry which are con- 
densed in Homer ? It is the heroic work of Ionia. We 
can see through its transparent progress. 

How, through the long centuries of the Dorian gymnas- 
tics, have the games and the festivals made living gods, 
types of strength and beauty, the races of Hercules and 
Apollo ? We see it, we know it, we assist at it. 

How the immense effort of statuary creation, the delicate 
art of immortalizing the beautiful, wrestled with time and 
envious death ? We can study it notwithstanding the 
greatness of our losses. 

How, finally, from the double analysis of the drama 
and of philosophy, the struggles of the moral man were 
illuminated, till that sublime moment in which, freed from 
the dogma, came forth the flower of the world and its 
true fruit, the justice from which Rome takes its point of 
departure ? It is the most luminous history which human 
genius has left behind. 

Terra-Mater — De-Meter or Ceres. 

Homer is so brilliant that he interrupts the view of the 
long past behind him. He enshrouds it in darkness by 
the intense brightness of his light, as a dazzling portico of 



Greece. 85 

Parian marble, glittering under the sun, prevents the sight 
of the immense temple, the ancient sanctuary, of which it 
conceals the entrance. 

If we start with Homer, as the primitive Greece, Greece 
would remain an inexplicable miracle. It would, like 
Pallas, Athene, come out in entire panoply, sword in hand. 
It would be full-grown and matured at birth, prepared to 
fight, with an adventurous spirit. Things never begin in 
this way. ^Eschylus, the profound ^Eschylus, very justly 
calls the Homeric divinities the "young gods." One of 
these young gods, the god with the arrows of gold, who 
spreads death in the Grecian camp, the Dorian god Apollo, 
makes all the plot of the J Had. 

Birth requires a soft cradle. Nothing comes from war. 
Peace and culture, the agricultural family, these are fruit- 
ful. Everything is born of earth, of woman. Thus 
Greece was born at the breast of Ceres, or Demeter, An- 
cient Deity, who rarely appears in the poet, but very 
frequently in tradition, and is the real life of the people. 

She was originally nothing but the earth, Terra- Mater, 
De-Meter,* the good mother, and nurse, so naturally 
worshipped by grateful humanity. The Pelasgi, first in- 
habitants of Greece, honored De-Meter in grottos before 
temples were erected. This rude and primitive worship 
was maintained in ancient Arcadia, which believed itself 
to be even older than the moon (Pro-Se/eni),i and which, 
enclosed by mountains and forests, remained the wild 
sanctuary of the ancient religions. Centuries passed in vain ; 

* Some writers are fond of deriving the name De-meter, from Ge, the Earth, 
and meter, or mother. It is possible, however, that this is not a correct 
etymology. The letter g is hardly transmutable into d, in any language. 
De-meter, also written Deo, is more probably from the Pelasgian, and akin 
to the Sanskrit Deva-matr, or Goddess-Mother, a title of Maha Lakshmi, or 
the Great Mother of gods and created beings. — Ed. 

f This is probably another false etymology. It is more likely that the 
Proseleni were the older race, who occupied Greece, as well as India, before 
the Seleni or Lunar tribes, the Ionians, who worshipped the younger and 
female deities. — Ed. 



86 Bible of Humanity. 

the Homers and the Pheidias made everything radiant 
with art ; but Arcadia held to its primitive gods up to the 
end of Greece. Pausanias tells us that many frequently 
journeyed to visit a shapeless image in which barbaric 
genius had boldly undertaken for the first time to express 
the complex personality of the earth. It was black, like 
the prolific soil, and supported all kinds of wild animals. 
In each hand it held the symbols of water and air, in the 
form of a dove and dolphin. The whole was crowned with 
the head of the horse,* the most noble animal produced on 
earth. Discordant and coarse image which gave only the 
exterior. The genius of Greece was not satisfied with it, 
and, wishing to express the interior of the earth, its 
mystery, its maternity, gave to it a daughter. This 
daughter is, itself, the earth, seen under a different aspect ; 
it is the earth in its gloomy and fruitful depths, filled with 
springs and volcanoes. Silent abyss in which descends all 
life, fatal kingdom to which all must go. It is the true 
black Ceres, the Sovereign, the imperious, the Despoina 
(lady, or our lady), Persephone or Proserpina. t 

She appears as aged as her mother. In this same Ar- 
cadia there was a sacred enclosure, where temples were 
erected at a later day, which contained an image of Des- 
poina, and near it, a Titan (son of Ouranos and Gaia), one 
of those geniuses of the earth who represent its unknown 
forces. Was he the father of Despoina? Very probably. 
Long after, when imperial Zeus or Jupiter was born, and 
when Despoina was made his daughter, this Titan became 
subordinated, and was simply the nurse and protector of 
the goddess. 

Ceres and Proserpina, the ruler of the earth above and 

* The mare, or hippa, whose head surmounted the statue at Phigalea, was a 
symbol suggested by the fact that the name was a pun on that of Hippa, the 
ancient goddess, mother of all, identical with Ceres and Ghilo. — Ed. 

\ The Despoina was the offspring of Ceres by Poseidon, the god of the 
Hamitic or Ethiopian world. If she is to be regarded as identical with Pros- 
erpina, the myth must be a variant of the Grecian one, which makes the 
latter the daughter of Zeus. — Ed. 



Greece, 87 

goddess of the earth below, were very generally revered. 
Without the first, it would be impossible for men to exist, 
and sooner or later all are received by the latter into her 
gloomy kingdom. War and invasion, which respect 
nothing, paused before their altars. They were the guar- 
dians of peace. They had sanctuaries everywhere in 
Pelasgian Dodona, in mysterious Samothracea, where they 
took for their coadjutor the geniuses of fire, in volcanic 
Sicily, and especially in the narrow pass of Thermopylae, 
where the gate to Greece could be opened and closed. 
From Eleusis, they ruled over Attica. The Arcadian gave 
to Proserpina the name of Soteira, Virgin of Salvation. 

Affecting worship, and of very singular conception ! 
It is marvellous to comprehend what Greece found in it. 
No poem, no statue, no monument, is so creditable to 
Greece as her wonderful perseverance in searching out 
and fathoming this holy mystery of the Spirit of the 
Earth, penetrating it from myth to myth by a progressive 
creation of deities or geniuses, and by a series of fables, 
all of them very wise and profoundly true. The charming 
Ionian genius united to it the solemnity of the more 
ancient race, the Pelasgians, who were also the parents of 
ancient Italy. Hence was evolved a religion full of peace 
and humanity, allied alike to Estia, Vesta, the pure genius 
of the hearth, and to the wise Themis, who, indeed, seems 
to be no other than Ceres herself. Both at Thebes and 
Athens Ceres brought men together, and made the laws. 
No culture can exist without order. Justice is born from 
the furrow. 

The little we know of this primitive Greece indicates 
gentle manners, more nearly allied to the original Hindoos, 
to the humane genius of the Vedas, than to the warrior 
age depicted in the Iliad. The most ancient traditions 
which remain of Greece relate to the profound horror 
inspired by the effusion of blood, especially in human 
sacrifices, which were detested as a peculiarity of barba- 
rians, and severely punished. Lykaon was changed into 



88 Bible of Humanity, 

a wolf* because he had immolated men. Tantalus was 
tormented in the underworld with intense thirst that 
nothing quenched. 

That which is Hindoo-like, and even appears Brahmin- 
ical, is their scruples against the killing of animals. Their 
very ancient ceremonies are a perpetual witness of the 
struggle which troubled the simple souls, who, having a 
horror for blood, were nevertheless condemned by their 
climate and work to nourish themselves with animal food. 
In order to immolate a victim they tried to persuade them- 
selves that the animal was guilty. A bull, for example, 
ate a sacred cake on the altar ; this sacrilege drew down 
the vengeance of heaven ; it was necessary to punish the 
animal. No one would otherwise have had the heart to 
kill this ancient servant, this companion of husbandry. 
They called a stranger, who struck and fled. A solemn 
inquest was made over the animal, the blood of which had 
been shed. All who had taken the least part in the 
slaughter were cited to judgment ; the man who had 
offered the weapon to the sacrificer, the man who had 
whetted it, the women who had brought water for its 
sharpening, all were called to account. They accused one 
another, and endeavored to place the blame on each other. 
At last all the guilt was imputed to the knife, which, not 
being able to defend itself, was condemned and thrown 
into the sea. They then made to the bull all the amends 
in their power. They raised it, stuffed it with straw, and 
put it before the plough, where it seemed to live again and 
take once more the honor of the work of agriculture. 

This peaceful people was incessantly exposed to ene- 
mies from the sea and the islands. The pirates of Asia 
and Phoenicia made frequent invasions for the purpose of 
kidnapping children and women. Cruel kidnapping ! 
These poor creatures, unexpectedly carried off and sold 
in Asia, were never found again. From the remotest 

* Another symbol suggested by a pun. Lykos is the Greek term for wolf; 
but Lykaon was a name of Zeus, as Pythias was of Apollo. — Ed. 



Greece. 89 

period up to the times of modern barbarism, the same 
misfortunes, the same griefs, the same cries, have existed. 
The poets and historians of all ages speak of this carrying 
off. It is the abduction of Io, of Europa, of Hesione, 
of Helen. Still more cruel was the terrible tribute of 
children paid to the Minotaur. Homer has described the 
silent grief of the father who, having lost his daughter, 
mournfully follows the shore, where the bitter and out- 
rageous waves bound and laugh at his sorrow. What can 
be said of the despair of a mother when the fatal boat 
carries off her treasure, when the daughter in tears vainly 
spreads her arms, flies, and disappears over the waves ? 

These tragedies* and especially the uneasiness under 
the expectations of such great misfortunes, contributed 
more than anything else to sharpen the faculties of this 
people, to give them so early that powerful sensitiveness 
whence broke forth their great religious creation, the 
legend of Ceres and Proserpina, the pathetic history of 
the Maternal Passion. There was no need of fiction for 
the design, or embellishment. All was nature and truth, 
and this is what made it so enduring, so strong, so long- 
continuing. Humanity still retains the impression, and 
will preserve it forever. 

The heart is impressed with the analogy which occasions 
grief, at the annual sight of the flower which separates 
and flies away from the plant, and is forever lost to its 
mother. What will happen to this flower, this grain, 
which has fled ? Where will the little one go ? The wind 
blows and rudely carries it off. The passing bird picks it 
up and departs. More frequently it seems as if it must 
die ; swallowed up, it falls in the black and obscure soil in 
which it is ignored, as if in the forgetfulness of the sep- 
ulchre ; and often man, for his own use, tortures it in 
every way, drowns it, grinds it, pounds it, and inflicts 
upon it a hundred tortures. Every people sings of this. 
Every tribe of mankind, from India to Ireland, has related 
in ballads the adventures and the miseries of this young 



go Bible of Humanity. 

creature. These narratives are frequently playful. Greece 
alone, which is regarded as so trifling, never laughed, but 
wept instead. 

The drama was formed before. That which truly be- 
longed to genius was the creation of Ceres, the idea of a 
mother worthy of adoration, whose infinite goodness 
makes still more sensible the cruel adventure. Afterward 
came the conception of the divine heart of woman, ex- 
panded by grief, who became the universal nurse and took 
all men for her children ; the whole of humanity is her 
Proserpina. 

Conception infinitely pure, and the purest that ever 
was ! The senses have nothing to do with it. The tender 
Isis, who weeps for her Osiris, makes no mystery of her 
ardent African love, of her poignant desire ; she weeps, 
she searches, she calls her husband. As to Ceres, the 
object worshipped and wept for was a daughter; therefore 
her legend will never undergo the ambiguity of those 
more recent religions in which the mother weeps for a 
son, and in which she, restored to youth by the arts, and 
becoming younger than he, is frequently less mother than 
spouse. 

Ceres is the earnest thought of all agricultural people. 
Work makes serious. There is but little of delicate or 
mystic refinement among a people who bear the burdens 
of life. Nothing subtle, nothing false. Truth in her most 
affecting aspect, the profound agreement of things which 
sophistical and unspiritual ages have separated, the heart 
and nature at one, the beauty of the infinite goodness, is 
what simple men conceived and even expressed in the first 
endeavor of the Grecian art. Long before the marbles of 
^Egina, ominous image of combats, the worshipped head 
of peaceful Ceres adorned the admirable medals of Sicily.* 



mtmisma- 



* See those in the cabinet of medals (Paris), and also Trisor de 
tujut et de glyptique, the Medals published by M. De Luynes. The Collec- 
tion Campana (Rome) had a very beautiful Ceies, which is supposed to be of 
the time of Phidias. Alas, she has been carried off to Russia ! In Russia 



Greece. 9 1 

Noble equipoise of simple rural, royal beauty. The rich 
hair of her head mingled its gold with that of the grain in 
the ear. 

Amidst joy, tears, the alternatives of good, of evil, of 
sun, of storm, she has one thing immovable — goodness. 
She loves the plants, as well as the innocent flocks, the 
gentle sheep, and especially children (malo-trophos, kou- 
ro-trophos). She is to all mother and nurse. Her swelling 
breast is constantly eager to be suckled, even when she is 
in tears. She is the love, honey, and milk of nature. 

Hard contrast of destiny ! This genius of peace, Ceres, 
was born in the midst of two contending powers. She 
flourishes in places in which the action of elements is 
more terrific, in the volcanic islands, in Sicily. However 
chaste and pure she may be, she is the object of two 
serious attractions. Goddess of fertility, she cannot ac- 
complish her work, except in receiving the dew of heaven, 
and on the other hand the obscure influences of subterra- 
nean heats, of powerful breaths which are exhaled from 
the earth. Zeus, as well as Pluto, assails her. She is a 
woman ; the dark depths affright her. How can she, 
being all love and life, decide to become the spouse of the 
kinc: of death? She hesitates, but, in the meantime, she 
cannot prevent the outpouring of the heaven in her bosom. 
All that this poor innocent knows about it is that she will 
have a little Ceres, who will bloom out of her, as the 
flourishing plant has a daughter which is itself. 

Her history is well known.* The young girl, in spring, 
not far from the sea, was gathering flowers in the meadow 
with her nymph companions. The first narcissus was in 



this daughter of Greece and of Sicily, this mother of the arts, and of human- 
ity ! 

* This history is the legend which was everywhere represented in sacred 
dramas. It is of superior antiquity, and perfectly distinct from that of the 
Hymn to Ceres, attributed to Homer ; as well as of the Mysteries of Eleusis, 
in which the poor Ceres, encroached upon by the worship of Bacchus, under- 
goes such sad alterations. 



Q2 Bible of Humanity. 

bloom. She earnestly desired this flower of the legends, 
which, as is well known, was a child. She attempted with 
both hands to tear it up and to carry it off, but the earth 
opened. The black Pluto suddenly appeared with his 
chariot and fiery steeds. She was carried away, the little 
unfortunate one, in spite of her tears and cries. She was 
so childish that she desired to retain her flowers. In vain. 
The flowers overspread the earth, which became verdant 
and flourishing. 

In her forced flight everything seems to disappear 
before her — earth, sea, and sky. In this we are reminded 
of Sita (the daughter of the furrow), who was carried away 
by the evil spirit Ravana ; but how superior and how 
much more touching is the incident in Greece ! Sita had 
no mother to weep for her. 

Poor Ceres ! All the gods work against her. They 
agreed among themselves to rend her heart. Jupiter con- 
sented to it. No one dared tell her what had become of • 
her daughter. She prayed, she addressed herself to all 
nature. No augur ; even the birds were silent. 

In despair, she tore off her head-band and released her 
long tresses. She adopted the dress of mourning, the 
blue mantle. She partook of no nourishment. She did 
not wash her beautiful body. Distracted, carrying the 
funeral torch, she rushed over the earth for nine days 
and nights. She was finally exhausted, sick. Hekate 
and the Sun finally took compassion and revealed all to 
her. Irreparable misfortune ! She will never again return 
to that unjust heaven. She will forever wander in misery 
over this lower earth. 

Bowed down by grief, she tottered like an old v/oman. 
She seated herself at noon under an olive tree, not far 
from a well. The women and girls who came to draw 
water spoke to her with compassion. Four beautiful 
maidens, daughters of the King, conducted her to their 
mother. 

"Who are you ?" 



Greece, 



93 



" I am the seeker. Pfrates carried me away. I fled. 
Give me a child to nourish and bring up." 

At this moment she darted out rays of such resplendent 
benignity that the Queen was agitated, dazzled, moved to 
tenderness, and placed her child in her arms, her cherished 
and last child, the child of her old age, who came to her 
twenty years after her daughters. 

In the meantime the heart of the goddess had been so 
oppressed by the gods that she could neither speak nor eat. 
No prayer, no tenderness could prevail on her. A surprise 
was necessary. A rural girl — bold, young, joyful, and lame 
— caused the goddess by her playfulness for a moment to 
forget her grief, and surprised her into a smile. She 
accepted nourishment, neither wine nor meat, but flour 
perfumed with mint, the future host of the mysteries. 
Sweet communion of the benign goddess with humanity. 
For ambrosia and nectar she took bread and water. Even 
more, she adopted the child, who thus from this time had 
two mothers, and became the son of earth and heaven. 

We may presume that, favored by her divine breath, 
he throve at her breast. Pervaded by her affluence, his 
nature became changed. She desired to make him im- 
mortal. Fire and trial by fire alone can deify. In later 
times Hercules arose to heaven from the^ pyre. Ceres, 
who made the delicate plants germinate by heat, knew 
well how to impart the heat to her child without pain or 
peril. Every night she placed him on the hearth. Unfor- 
tunately the curious mother came to observe, was alarmed, 
and cried out. "Alas, alj is over ! Man will not be immor- 
tal. He must endure the evils and miseries of humanity." 

Thus Ceres,, who had lost her daughter, lost also her 
adopted son. More desperate than ever, she again com- 
menced her wanderings with dishevelled hair. She ap- 
peared to be devoured with grief. Heaven oppressed her 
heavily, and the earth was odious to her. The soil dried 
up and became unproductive ; when its goddess suffers 
can the earth be any other than a dreary desert ? Ceres 



94 Bible of Humanity, 

had renounced her useless divinity ; she wandered in the 
dusty roads, and as a mendicant sat by the road-side. All 
our necessities besieged her ; she sank under fatigue and 
hunger. An old woman compassionately gave her a little 
broth, which she swallowed greedily. To crown her 
calamities, she was scoffed at. An unworthy boy jeered 
and pointed the finger of derision at her, and mimicked 
her greediness. Cruel ingratitude ! that man could laugh 
at the kind nurse that alone supports human life. But 
malice punishes itself. The boy dried up in his wicked- 
ness ; became a reptile, the slim, tapering lizzard, the dry 
occupant of heaps of stones. A good lesson to make us 
charitable. Child, never laugh at a supplicant. Who 
knows that he is not a god ? 

The earth suffered so much that heaven is touched and 
alarmed. No harvests, no animals. The gods, without 
sacrifices, are also famishing. They send down Iris, 
Mercury, and all the messengers of heaven. 

" No ; give me back my daughter." 

It is necessary that Pluto should yield, at least for a 
brief period. Her beloved daughter escaped from the 
world of the dead, arrived in a chariot of fire, and em- 
braced her mother. Ceres was almost overcome from joy. 
But how changed the daughter ! More beautiful than ever, 
but so gloomy ! Injured beauty ! Frail beauty ! Death 
and flowers! Winter and Spring! Behold the double 
Proserpina, charming and formidable, who almost imposes 
even on her mother. 

"Ah, my daughter! art thou mine? Dost thou not 
still belong to the under world ? Hast thou partaken of 
anything there below, in the world of the dead ? " 

Indeed, Pluto had not allowed her to depart until she 
had taken a kernel of the mysterious fruit of fecundity, the 
pomegranate, with its numerous grains.* In other words, 



* Flu- pomegranate, or rhoia, is a sexual svmbol, suggested by the pun 
"I "» the name of Rhea, the Great Mother, and also by the female eidolon upon 



Greece. 95 

she brought back the dark fecundation of the black empire, 
to which she must return ; and thus, year after year, in the 
autumn, she is again separated from her mother. She 
falls into the depth of her night ; but Ceres, in the spring, 
has the joy of again finding her, mingled with the sadness 
of the expectation of her departure. 

hold life and its alternatives. Ceres bears all the 
burden. Who will console her? Work, the good which 
she does to man. She has not been able to make of man 
a god, as she desired, but she has made him a worker, a 
Triptolemus, grinder of the soil with the plough, and of the 
grain with the mill-stone — the just Triptolemus, the child 
of husbandry, peaceful, economical, full of respect for the 
work of others, and wise friend of order and law. 

Beautiful history ! And so true ! Mingled with joy and 
sadness, and particularly with wisdom and admirable 
good sense ! It was interpreted in two popular festivals, 
very simple, quite natural, and, at the time, without mys- 
tery or refinement. 

In spring the AuthcspJioria, the festival of flowers. The 
beautiful Proserpina then returns to cover the earth with 
vegetation ; she brings back the enchantments of life. She 
does not bring everything; she leaves our beloved dead 
behind. Our joy is not without tears, since they do not 
return. We weave wreaths for them and for their tombs. 
Smiling, but tenderly, woman crowns with flowers her aged 
father, her little child. It is good that there are births, since 
there are deaths. Grief commands love. This floral festival 
was that of the human flower, the great day of the women 
and of the serious joys of marriage. The very chaste 
Ceres thus wished and ordained. 

In the autumn, the TJusviophoria, festival of women, 

the fruit. The goddess Nova, eating one, is said to have become pregnant of 
Atys ; and at the Thesmophoria, where women were required to observe the 
strictest continence, the pomegranate was interdicted. It was sacred to 
Pro-erpina, because all who are begotten are denizens of the region of mor- 
tality ; Venus- Urania and Queen Kore are substantially the same. — Ed. 



96 Bible of Humanity, 

festival of laws. It was to women that the goddess had 
entrusted her laws of order and humanity. Not without 
reason. Who is so much interested in society as mothers, 
who have so much at stake, the child ? Who so much as 
they are stricken by anarchy and war ? 

Autumn has a double character. For man, refreshed 
and rested, who has but little more to do than to sow and 
taste the new wine, it is gay and sometimes too joyous. 
But women remembered that autumn is for Ceres the sad 
moment, in which she sees her daughter descending into 
the earth, and for this reason they rejected the attentions 
of their husbands and abandoned them for several days. 
Smiling at their own affected austerity, and at the com- 
plaints which this separation elicited, they went either to 
the sea, to the gloomy promontory where the goddess was 
worshipped, or to the celebrated temple of Eleusis, after 
it was built. They conveyed in solemn procession the 
laws of Ceres, laws of peace, which, on their return, they 
easily made their eager husbands promise under oath to 
obey from regard to the welfare of the child, whose advent 
they so earnestly desired. 

What are those powerful laws which have bound society 
so firmly together ? Very simple, if we judge them by 
those which have been preserved. They prescribed the 
love of family, the horror of blood, and nothing more. 
But this was of prodigious influence. In the spirit of Ceres 
the family, enlarged, became the neighborhood, the tribes, 
which, united, became the village; the united villages 
became the commonwealth. No bloodshed of men or 
animals. No offerings to the gods but fruits. If the ani- 
mal was spared, how much more man ! No war, eternal 
peace. At least, a spirit of peace even in necessary war. 
I<rom this I can see the altar of compassion erected in 
Athens. I see peace deified at the great festivals of 
Olympia and Delphos, which united the States and made 
them one people. 

llus respect for human life, considered precious to the 



Greece. gj 

gods, sacred and divine, certainly contributed more than 
anything else to produce the conviction of immortality. 
If the flower only dies to be born again, why should not 
the human soul, this flower of the world, live again ? 
Wheat, in its birth and in its eternal re-births, taught the 
resurrection far better than any dogma. St. Paul, in his 
epistles, man)- centuries afterward, makes use of no other 
illustration than the lesson of Ceres.* 

In this and in everything else Ceres was the great teacher. 
Her worship, popular, enriched and dramatized in an im- 
posing manner, culminated in later days in the mysteries, 
which, although attacked by Christians, were imitated by 
them. 

I for benefactions have been immense. She gave a basis 
of ardent love to the light, Ionian temper, which was very 
fickle and changeable. She created the Athenian com- 
monwealth, and drew the outlines of the social system 
which were peculiarly humane. 

It is not the variable fancy, the imagination which could 
engender life. To make a world it is absolutely necessary 
that there be great love, great truth. The maternity of 
Ceres, her pure love, which overflows with goodness, was 
the cradle of Greece. Long before the Olympus of Homer 
there were vast, silent centuries, which were incubating 
the future. Powerful, fruitful hearth ! From this legend 
of a mother, Greece received the flame which quickened 
her as a mother also. In order to understand the ages in 
which she enlightened the world, it is necessary to consider 

* First Epistle to the Corinthians, xv., 36-45 : "Fool, that which thou 
sowest is not quickened except it die : and that which thou sowest, thou sowest 
not that body that shall be, but bare grain ; it may chance of wheat, or of some 
other grain : but God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed 
its own body. ... So also is the anastasis, or future life of the dead. - It is 
sown in the corruptible, and is raised in the incorruptible; it is sown in the 
unhonored, and is raised in glory ; it is sown in weakness, and is raised in 
power ; it is sown a physical body, and is raised a spiritual body " — i. e. y sown 
under the physical and moral influences of earth-life, and lives again invested 
with the divine qualities of the heavenly world. — Ed. 

5 



98 Bible of Humanity, 

her, first as a child adopted by Ceres ; second, when she 
took the torch from the hand of Ceres, or when, under 
the care of Ceres, she gathered the flowers of Eleusis or 
Enna.* 

The Vanity of the Ionic Gods.— The Strength of the 
Human Family. 

Science marches and light advances. The new faith is 
confirmed in finding under the earth its substantial roots 
in the remote antiquity. The memorable conflict which I 
witnessed while still young, between liberty and theocracy, 
the true and false erudition on the Greek origins, is finally 
ended. Chief, living question, of eternal interest ! Was 
this most brilliant people its own Prometheus, or was it 
taught and moulded by a priesthood ? \ Was it the work of 
a sacerdotal caste, or the spontaneous fruit of the human 
mind ? 

Thirty years of work have decided the question and 
severed the knot forever. The results are so clear and 
decided, that the enemy dare no longer breathe. From 
below, in all details, from point to point the enemy is 
beaten. From on high a great flash of sunlight, the 
youthful philology, overwhelms him still more, bringing 
out into full daylight the fact that in those ancient origins 
there is no artifice of a sacerdotal caste, no complicated 
symbolism, but the free action of good sense and of 
nature. 

* Enna was denominated the amphalos of Sicily, as Delphi was of Greece. 
Its importance as the seat of this myth is evidence that it pertained to Asia 
and Phoenicia, rather than to Greece. — Ed. 

\ Mr. Guignaut, a truly learned man, who has devoted his life in the immense 
work of translating, completing, and connecting Kreuzer's Symbolique, has 
been among us, in this century, the true founder of the study of religions. 

This beloved teacher was the guide of us all. The Renans, Maurys, and 
all the eminent critics of this age have sprung from him. He opened the way 
even to those who, like myself, incline toward the anti-symbolique, toward 
Strauss, Lobeck, and believe with the latter that if Ceres is very ancient, the 
Mysteries of Eleusis, and the Orgian myths are of recent origin. See 
LOBECK, Aglaophamcs, 1829, Koenigsberg. 



Lrreece. 99 

The venerable worship of the soul of the earth, of Ceres 
and of Proserpina, affecting, but not without terror, which 
showed in twenty different places the abyss closed, the 
door of Pluto, would have created anywhere else than in 
Greece a powerful sacerdotal order. It was twice at- 
tempted and failed. In the most ancient times this worship 
was subordinated to the joyous elasticity of the Ionian 
transformations, the fancy of strolling singers, who varied 
the fables and the gods. Later, when the mysteries, aided 
by the arts and by an ingenious system of worship, could 
have taken strong hold of the people, the commonwealth 
existed, incredulous and mirthful. iEschylus was banished, 
Socrates was put to death, but sacerdotal rule could not 
be established, and fell under the popular scorn. 

The latest results of modern criticism are as follows : 

First, Greece has received nothings or almost nothing, 
from a foreign priesthood. What she believed to be 
Phoenician, Egyptian, is profoundly Grecian. In her ages 
of strength and genius she delighted only in herself, 
and scorned all triviality. This preserved her youth, the 
perfect harmony which produced her fertility. When, at 
length, the gloomy gods of Asia stealthily crept into her 
bosom, she had accomplished her work, and was beginning 
her decadence. 

Second, at no period has Greece had a real and organized 
Sacerdotal order* The vain supposition that she had 
such a caste before her historical period is without proof 
or probability. She has not been guided. It is for this 
reason that she has marched forward erect, and with 
wonderful equilibrium. 

One of the most serious effects of priestcraft is to absorb 
everything, and crystallize it into some form, to engross 

* The book of Benj. Constant, frequently superficial, is strong on this 
point, and deserves great attention. Its principal assertions are confirmed in 
the learned work in which Mr. Alfred Maury has compiled all the recent 
labors of Germany, arranging them in an excellent and new order, which 
throws great light on them. History of the Greek Religions, 3 vols. (1857.) 



ioo Bible of Humanity. 

all life in one organ, one sense only. This is of infinite 
advantage to the part. It gives you, for example, a 
monstrous hand, while the arm is dry, the body consump- 
tive. This is what appeared so forcibly in Egypt, and 
still more in Europe, during the middle ages, which had 
some exquisite sense, or some gigantic organ, while the 
whole was feeble, poor, sterile. In Greece, left to her 
free genius, all the faculties of man — body and soul, 
instinct and work, poetry, criticism, and philosophy — 
everything grew up and flourished together. 

Third, Greece, mother of fables, as she is very pleas- 
antly called, had two gifts at once — to make fables and to 
give but little credit to them. Imaginative without, inter- 
nally reflective, she was but slightly the dupe of her own 
imagination. No people exaggerated less. She could in- 
cessantly invent and relate marvels. Such things did not 
disturb her mind. The miracle had but little hold on her. 
A heaven, made and remade by the poets and the strolling 
singers, her only theologians, did not inspire her with 
sufficient confidence to induce her to fold her arms over 
her breast, and wait for what was to come to her from on 
high. She started from the idea that man is the brother 
of the gods, born, as they were, of the Titans. Work, art, 
and struggle, eternal gymnastics of soul and body, con- 
stitute the true life of man, which, in spite of the very 
gods, and even despite their jealousy, make him a hero and 
almost a god. 

How, then, could this Olympus, made by accident, as it 
seems, improvised by the blind, the singers of cross-roads, 
of temples or of banquets, the Phemius, the Demodocus ; 
how could it acquire any unity ? For different audiences 
the muse was different. The fables, which were sung 
about the temples at sacred solemnities, became warlike, 
and possibly playful, in the palaces of the kings, as are some 
of the songs of the Odyssey. Will not -utter confusion 
result from all this ? 

ISy no means. Everything becomes gradually arranged. 



Greece. 101 

These singers are, at the bottom, of the same soul as the 
people, and their life, manners, surroundings, differ but 
little from theirs. Their art is the same, their process the 
same. They speak to the same person, to Nature, whose 
voice answers. 

We see to-day, by the true etymologies, that these myth- 
ological creations in Greece, as in the India of the Vedas, 
are at first simply elementary forces, Earth, Water, Air, 
Fire. In the Grecian world, which alone personifies and 
defines objects, the evocation of the poet brings forth 
everywhere spirits, lively and active, like that of the 
poet himself. It calls into action a number of beings, 
which were believed to be things. The oaks were 
compelled to open themselves, to set free the nymphs, 
which they had long enclosed. And even the stone, 
erected on the road-side, suggested the enigma of the 
Sphinx. 

Innumerable voices, but not discordant. The great con- 
cert is divided in parties, in groups, in harmonious scales. 
We have seen that of the earth. From Ceres, the vener- 
ated, formidable, chaste goddess, the people knew how 
to draw out an immense world of amiable gods. Friend 
of heat, parent of Fire (or Estia), she aspired to descend 
into the Earth. To spare her this subterranean voyage, 
they created for her a daughter, another Ceres. To spare 
her the severe labor of tillage, an inferior genius was born, 
a rustic, male Ceres, the^r/tfdfe'tf^Triptolemus. To defend 
her kingdom, the field, the harvest, the boundaries, laws 
and penalties were necessary. But would the good Ceres 
punish ? This charge was given to Themis, the cold Ceres 
of the law, whose sword was Theseus, legislator of Athens, 
the valiant Ionian Hercules. 

The gamut of Fire is no less rich — beginning with the 
deformed Cabiri, proceeding to the Cyclops, thence to the 
workman Vulcan, and culminating in Prometheus the 
artist — while from night (Latona) radiated the splendors 
of Phoebus, and from the charged, gloomy brow of Jupiter 



102 Bible of Humanity. 

springs forth the ether, the sublime brightness of Minerva, 
of wisdom. 

But all these gods astoundingly differ, if I dare say it, 
in stability. A book could be written on their different 
tempers : the Physiology of Olympus. Let us admit that 
many will remain in the fog cc even something less, being 
merely adjectives, like the synonymes of Agni, from which 
India made the names of God. Others, a little more firm, 
as Max Muller well says, are already coagulated, of some 
consistence, but still remain transparent, diaphanous ; we 
see through them. Their father, the Ionic genius, does 
not allow them even occasionally to act as persons, except 
on the condition that they remain elements, which, as such, 
are always subject to metamorphosis. In this condition 
he can always dispose of them, vary them, enrich them 
with new adventures, marry them, and draw heroes from 
them. 

This mythological manipulation is very easy to follow 
in the gamut of the gods of the Air, who were naturally 
fluctuating, and furnished easy facilities for transformations. 

The superior Air, the heaven, the father Zeus, Ju- 
piter, has necessarily the highest place, the throne of 
nature. He causes rain, he produces everything. Suc- 
cessor of the old gods, of the Titans, he engenders the 
family of the Hellenic gods. He rules, he has the thunder, 
and terrifies the world. He rolls it with great noise, per- 
forming the functions, which Indra discharges in the Vedas. 
As to the winds, he delegates his power to ^Eolus, a little 
Jupiter, who keeps them confined in leathern bags in 
obscure caverns. 

If Jupiter is the great fertilizer below, it is because he 
is also a celestial fecundity above. In Asia he would 
have been a double-sexed god. In Greece they divide 
him in two, and give him a consort, who is but the Air, 
the female Air, Here or Juno. Air, troubled, agitated, 
angry. This is not sufficient. In the sublime heights, 
above the clouds, in the pure ether, we see quite another 



Greece. 103 

thing. Jupiter becomes triple. They create for him a 
daughter, Pallas- Athene, who is produced out of him alone, 
and not of his Juno. Afterward came the Dorians, who 
compelled him to share his rule of the storm with the 
young god Apollo, who was furnished with arrows, like 
the Indra of the Vcdas, to pierce the dragon of the clouds. 
Thus from Zeus, or the Father Heaven, is made a whole 
series of gods, not fortuitous nor in disorder, but well- 
linked, progressive, harmonious, a beautiful gamut of 
poetry. Zeus, doubled, tripled, quadrupled, nevertheless 
maintains his supreme rank, and his noble representative- 
ness.* He is the father of all the young Olympians, and, 
as toward the end all will recognize themselves in him, 
will see that they are nothing but him alone, his superi- 
ority prepares for philosophers their future conception, 
the unity of God. 

Greece, in a peculiar instinct of moral progress, does 
not allow her gods to rest and fall asleep. She fashions 
them incessantly, from legend to legend, humanizes them, 
educates them. We can follow her process from age to 
age. The gods-natural in vain personify themselves ; 
they grew pale. The gods-human started up, the gods- 
moral increased. The gods-judicial, heroic redressers of 
wrongs, whose triumph closes divine history, throw away 
their robes at last, show the true hero, the wise man. 
Of Hercules there is left the Stoical, that scholastic 
philosophers very appropriately call the second Hercules. 
It is the living stone, the firm rock of Right, on which 
Rome soon enthroned her jurisprudence. 

* The Grecians always speak grandiloquently of him, with an emphatic 
grandeur, which is not by any means expressive of real respect. He is a god 
of pomp and decoration. They pay him with ceremonies. As to the serious- 
ness, the reality, he is by no means on a plane with many gods, who appear to 
be inferior. He is easily deceived. This King of Olympus, jocosely caught 
by his wife, who lulled him to sleep on the Ida {Iliad), duped by Prometheus 
(Hesiod), who, for his part of the victim, made him take the skin and the 
bones, recalls something of the Charlemagne of the Four Sons Aymon, who 
falls asleep on the throne and is scoffed at in his sleep. 



1 04 Bible of Humanity. 

This is the supreme and distant aim toward which we 
walk blindly, but very surely : it is necessary to make the 
Hero. 

To say that the gods come down and incarnate them- 
selves, as they do in India, would avail but to lull human 
activity to sleep. The important thing is to establish a 
succession of gradations, a ladder on which we can ascend 
and descend, and on which the man of strength and labor, 
having developed that which God put in him, would mount 
as on wings, and himself become divine. Neither the 
language nor the Greek spirit allowed the poets to express 
divine births except by divine loves. The more ethereal 
among the gods, the aerial Jupiter, had the part of a great 
lover. The popular minstrels did not spare him. While 
they gave him the imposing figure and the dark eyebrows, 
the threatening beard of the Father of the gods, they 
launched him into a thousand youthful adventures. All 
this playfully, and in a light, loquacious manner. Not 
even one impassioned trait. 

There was nothing more transparent than this in the 
language. There is scarcely any possibility of being 
mistaken. The physical meaning is always clear. The 
translation only is obscure. It exaggerates the personality 
of these elementary beings. " Zeus rained in the Force 
(literally the name of Alcmene), and begot the Strong 
(Alcides)" Zeus rained through the storm in the Earth 
(Semele), which, thunderstruck, conceived Bacchus, or 
the ardent wine. What more clear to those primitive 
tribes, who led only an agricultural life ? * These fables 
of the loves and of the divine generations appeared truly 
scandalous when Euhemerus, and those like him explained 



* In a small book, admirable for strength and good sense, Mr. Louis Minard 
says very appropriately of this agricultural age, still very near to nature, which 
had just made these symbols and which saw perfectly through them : " No 
one took more offence at the thousand marriages of Zeus and Aphrodite than 
one thinks to-day that the oxygen is debauched because it is united with all 
bodies." L. Minard's Morals before Philosophers (i860), p. 104. 



Greece. 105 

them in the pretended history of the kings of time past, 
when Ovid and other story tellers enlivened them with 
witticisms of libertine freedom, when at last the enfeebled 
minds of the decadence, a Plutarch for example, entirely 
disregarded the primitive signification. In vain the Stoics, 
by a just interpretation, which philology now confirms, 
showed in these fables the mixture of the physical elements. 
The Christians carefully avoided the consideration of their 
merits ; they simply laid hold of these legends to attack 
and denounce them. 

In the times of Byzantium, when all elevated meaning 
became dull, no one was keen enough to perceive the 
double character of these antique fables, the clare- 
obscure in which they floated between the dogma and 
the tale. Dully and authoritatively they interrogate Greece : 
" Dost thou believe ? Dost thou not believe? " It seems 
to us that they are like a schoolmaster scolding a child of 
genius who has, as we have at that age, the gift of imagin- 
ing and half believing all he fancies. These old block- 
heads do not know that man begins thus. They overlook 
the fact that between belief and unbelief there are infinite 
gradations, innumerable intermediates. 

With this inventive people, of a fluent and thoughtless 
speech, so long as the gods had their true lives, their 
ready mythological vegetation, the gods were too change- 
able to weigh heavily on their minds. In the places where 
tradition located their divine adventures, in the vicinity of 
an oracle or a temple, there was doubtless more credulity. 
The popular minstrels eloquently related the marvels of 
the temple to the enraptured traveller, who learned them 
in verses in order the better to remember them, but not 
without adding some poetical variations. These tales were 
constantly transmitted with changes, each new minstrel 
feeling the same right over the muse and the inspiration. 

I have said elsewhere how much of liberty the interior 
soul of India preserved against her dogmas, notwithstand- 
ing the appearances of a very strong sacerdotal yoke. But 
5* 



1 06 Bible of Humanity. 

how much more this liberty existed in Greece, which had 
no such yoke, and which made and remade herself inces- 
santly. She had no need whatever of severe criticism nor 
of harsh irony in order to defend the moral significance 
of the light eccentricities of the religious fable. It was 
enough for her to have that which best preserves from 
divine tyrants, the smile. 

Greece had not that severe attitude, that solemnity, 
which are the characteristic of some nations. But the 
genius of motion, the inventive power, which was indefat- 
igable in her, a certain light vivacity, always wafted her 
above vulgar and low things. A very pure air, not in the 
least enervating; the sublime ether of a blue sky, freely 
circulates, and keeps life buoyant. That which domineers 
there is not properly the scruple of conscience, the fear of 
sin, the intention of flying from this or that. Her own 
nature, a sap severely fresh for action, art or combat, the 
innate flame of Pallas, keeps her in the heroic state. 

This is wonderfully expressed in her beautiful traditions. 
When Agamemnon set out for a long absence to conduct 
the war against Troy, whom does he place near Clytem- 
nestra ? Whom do we see sitting near her at meals, and 
in the hours of relaxation ? A priest ? No. A singer, 
whose noble measures will sustain her heart. Respectful 
guardian, this minister of the chaste muses will battle 
against the reveries, the effeminate languors in the woman. 
He will talk to her of the sublime history of the past — 
Antigone sacrificing her love and life to sisterly affection ; 
Alcestes dying for her husband ; Orpheus following his 
Eurydice down to the under world. As long as he sings, 
the spouse is entirely absorbed in the remembrance of the 
absent Agamemnon, so that the perfidious ^Egystus could 
not succeed in leading her astray, till he had forcibly 
carried off the lyrist. He expelled him to a desert island. 
The queen, abandoned by the muses, was also abandoned 
by virtue. 

That which astonishes is, that certain things, in a south- 



Greece. 107 

em climate, remind us of the cold purity of the north. 
The youngest daughter of Nestor bathes Telemachus. 

Laertes, father of Ulysses, caused his daughter to be 
brought up with his young slave Eumeus. The daughter 
of the wise Centaur Cheiron, who yields in nothing to her 
father, educates a young god and teaches him all the 
mysteries of nature. We think that we are in Scandi- 
navia ; that we are reading the Nialsaga in which the 
noble maiden has a warrior tor her preceptor. 

Greece exhibits the exact opposite of the middle ages. 
In the latter, all literature, or nearly all, glorifies adultery; 
poems, fables, Christmas carols, everything celebrates 
cuckolding. Of the two great Grecian poems, one pun- 
ishes adultery by the overthrow of Troy ; the other is the 
heroic return of the husband, and the triumph of fidelity. 
In vain the suitors besiege Penelope. In vain the Calypsos, 
the Circes, gave themselves to Ulysses, and desired that 
he should, with love, drink immortality. He preferred 
his Ithaca, preferred Penelope and dying. 

Horrible thing, which makes a father of the church 
shudder : " Saturn devoured his children ! What an 
example for the family!" He assured, good man. He 
swallows stones instead of children. 

In reality the Greek family relation is very strong, and 
no less pure. The history of CEdipus and others shows 
plainly how much horror the Greek had of such unions as 
they regarded suitable only to barbarians. 

Before the Dorian invasion, those cruel wars, which 
transformed the archaic world of Greece, the family was 
altogether the holy association, which is seen in the Vedas 
and in the Avcsta. It had its normal and legitimate har- 
mony. When Philosophy, the sweet Socratic wisdom of 
Xenophon,* logically investigates what is the true role of 

* With great regret I deny myself the pleasure of citing the admirable chap- 
ter of Xenophon's Economy. We perfectly perceive that if war, public life, 
constant danger, separated the Greek from his wife, and tore the family asun- 
der, the ideal of marriage was always the same. The heart was still the heart. 



io 8 Bible of Humanity. 

woman, it has nothing to do but simply to come back to 
what the Odyssey describes. 

In Homer the mistress of the house has half the govern- 
ment, all the interior cares, even those of hospitality. 
She sits opposite to her husband, and is his equal at the 
hearth. It is to her that the supplicant must first apply. 
The amiable Nausicaa, who received the shipwrecked 
Ulysses on the shore, recommended him to speak first to 
her mother. This mother, the wise Arete, appears to all 
a kind providence, and even to Alcinoiis, her husband, 
who has long had an easy time of it, and, to use his daugh- 
ter's words, " drinks like an immortal." Arete supplied 
his place ; by her prudence and peaceful disposition she 
settled disputes, prevented litigation, and was the um- 
pire of the people. 

The wife was much esteemed by both husband and son. 
Laertes, says Homer, would have loved his beautiful and 
wise slave, Euryclee, very much, but did not, "from fear 
of the wrath of his wife." This wife, mother of Ulysses, 
was tenderly loved on this account. There is nothing so 
artlessly pathetic as the interview of this hero with the 
spirit of his mother. He tearfully asked her the cause of 
her death. Was it destiny ? Was it the arrows of Diana, 
who by disease carries us off from life? l( No, my son, 
it was not Diana, it was not destiny — it was the remem- 
brance pf thee, it was thy goodness which killed me. It 
was the regret for a son who was so good to me." 

It changes less than is supposed. There is nothing more charming than to read 
in Xenophon the wise household royalty of the young mistress of the house, 
who not only governs her male and female servants, but also knows how to 
make them love her, and takes care of them in sickness (chap. vii. ). The 
husband does not hesitate to say to her : "The sweetest charm will be when 
thou, having become more perfect than myself, wilt make me thy servant. 
Time does not affect it. Beauty increases by virtue." In order to deceive 
us in this, and make us believe that woman (even in the Homeric times) was 
dependent upon her son, the words of Telemachus to Penelope are quoted ; 
but at this particular moment Telemachus is inspired by a god to speak with 
such unusual authority. He needed to overawe the suitors. with those stern 
words, etc. Benj. Constant has explained this delicately and very judiciously. 



Greece. 109 

The Invention of the Municipality, 

The first work was Olympus, the second was the 
City. 

The latter, wonderful work of Grecian genius, new 
then, unheard of, without example and without prece- 
dence. All the effort of man, heretofore, had made only 
towns, a bringing together of tribes, aggregating villages, 
uniting them for their security. Entire nations have col- 
lected themselves in the enormous towns of Asia. Those 
prodigies, Babylon, Nineveh, Thebes with its hundred 
gates, notwithstanding their splendor, their riches, are 
nevertheless monstrous. To Greece alone belongs the 
creation of the City, supreme harmony of Art which is 
all the more natural for it, a pure, regular beauty never 
excelled, subsisting by the side of formulas of reason- 
ing and of geometrical figures, which Greece has also 
traced. 

Has the City of the Olympus prepared that of the earth ? 
Yes, Olympus already inclined to the republic. The gods 
are somewhat free ; they deliberate, they plead, they have 
their Agora. Pluto, Neptune, in their subordinate king- 
doms, were independent. Nevertheless the monarchical 
element predominates in Jupiter, the Agamemnon of the 
gods. The Commonwealth beneath is quite different. It 
bears but a light resemblance to the irregular government 
of heaven. The republic on high is a childish work com- 
pared to the human republic. From this poor ideal there 
is an immense stride before we arrive at last to the real 
miracle, Athens ; to the all-powerful cosmos, living organ- 
ism, the most fertile that ever existed. 

The work was neither altogether human, nor of spon- 
taneous calculation. Terrible necessities acted, helped, 
compelled. Danger redoubled genius. Through the vio- 
lent crisis which, elsewhere, would have extinguished it, 
this genius made, and fashioned itself, was its own Vulcan, 
its industrious Prometheus, briefly Pallas-Athene, Athens. 



no Bible of Humanity. 

It is a long history, which I do but indicate. 

I have said that all the Greek world, in its beautiful 
equipoise of fancy and criticism, was born from a smile. 
On one hand the gracious genius which made the gods of 
Greece ; on the other hand the light irony, altogether in- 
stinctive and scarcely conscious, which however kept the 
soul wonderfully serene, free from the fear of both gods 
and destiny. 

This smile appears on the marble of yEgina, where peo- 
ple kill each other amidst bursts of laughter. "Is it acci- 
dental ? " some one may ask. " Is it the impotency of an 
awkward art ? " The same expression is noticeable in twen- 
ty places in the Iliad. The blood flows in swelling waves, 
but the heroes stop willingly to converse. There is great 
wrath, no hatred. Achilles explains obligingly to Lycaon, 
who asks for his life, why he will kill him. He had before 
made him prisoner, but he had escaped, and he had found 
him again. " Patroclus," he said, "is dead, and I also, 
must I not die young ? " Then die, friend ! # 

Here is a very primitive characteristic. Among many 
modern, superadded things, the Iliad in general pre- 
serves its character of rugged youth. It is not the dawn 
of Greece, but the morning. The air is keen. A strong 
vigor is felt throughout. The earth is green and the sky 
blue. A vernal breeze ruffles the hair of the heroes. They 
struggle, they die, they kill. They have no hatred. They 
scarcely weep. This is the lofty serenity of a haughty 
era which hovers over death and life. 

But do they know what death is ? We may question 
it. It appears brilliant and almost triumphant. To ascend 
the pyre with the purple and the armor of gold, to vanish 
in glory, to leave the sun for the delightful light of the 
Elysian Fields, where we can sport with heroes, is not 
a great misfortune. Death, either given or received, 
does not materially change the soul. While Judaism 



* Iliad, xxi. , ' AXXa <pt2,og Qdve x ai <*»• 



Greece. 1 1 1 

promises long life to the children of God, Greece says : 
"They, whom the gods love, die young." She who is 
youth itself, wishes no other life than youth. She has 
compassion only on Tithonus, old husband of Aurora, 
old without remedy, who cannot die. 

The Greeks continually quarrelled and came to blows 
among themselves. But their combats were trifling. 
With much good sense they respected the seasons of 
labor and of sowing. They appeared in their strug- 
gles, in their surprises, in their ambushes, to aim, above 
everything else, to make light of the enemy, and at 
the glory of dexterity. Their most excellent achieve- 
ment was to carry off their enemy and ransom him. But 
they did not care to make slaves ; they did not know 
what to do with them. Their great simplicity of life, their 
husbandry so little complicated, often confined to olive 
trees and a little pasture, scarcely needed slaves. The 
household slave, employed in the personal cares, appeared 
intolerable. It would have been a punishment to them to 
have forever in their homes the enemy, a gloomy and 
silent figure, a permanent malediction. They made their 
own children serve them. 

The Locrians and the Phocians never had slaves. If a 
Greek on the shores chanced to buy a child from pirates, it 
became one of the family. Eumaeus, in the Odyssey ', sold 
to the king Laertes, is brought up by him with his daugh- 
ter. He is like a brother to Ulysses. He waits for his 
return for twenty years; he weeps for him, and cannot be 
consoled for his absence. 

A most singular thing — which, however, is established 
by the most positive testimony, that is, by the language it- 
self, and by a proverbial phrase — war created friendships. 
The prisoner — led to the home of his conqueror, admitted 
at his hearth, eating and drinking with him, his wife, and 
children — was one of the household. He became what was 
called his Doryxenos, the guest whom he had made with 
his spear. Having paid his ransom and returned to his 



H2 Bible of Humanity. 

own home, he entertained his former host, lodged and 
fed him without exciting distrust, when his conqueror 
visited the market towns or the national festivals of his 
country. 

" The slave is an ugly man," says Aristotle. Slavery is 
the ugliest of things. Such a monstrosity was for a long 
time unknown in Greece, the country of beauty. It was 
in perfect contrast with the fundamental principle of such 
society, with its manners and its beliefs. How, in fact, 
could slavery, "which is a form of death," as the juris- 
prudents well say, agree with a religion of life, which sees 
in all force a divine life ? This joyous Hellenic religion, 
which even in things inert feels a soul and a god, has 
justly for its foundation the liberty of all beings.* Slavery, 
which kills the soul while the body yet lives, is the oppo- 
site of such a dogma, its contrary and its negation. Greece, 
by her mythology, emancipated the elements and enfran- 
chised even the stones. Was this to change man into a 
stone ? She humanized the animal. Jupiter, in Homer, 
has compassion on the horses of Achilles, and consoles 
them. Solon made a law, based on the ancient religious 
prohibition, which forbade the killing of the ox that plough- 
ed the earth. Athens erected a monument to the faithful 
dog that died with his master. The Athenian slave was 
almost a freeman, "and did not yield the walk to him," 
says Xenophon. The comical writers bear witness to this, 
that the slave often mocked the freeman. 

Greece would have remained, perhaps, in a certain state 
of effeminacy if the Dorian invasions had not introduced a 
decided contradiction. Sparta did not inflict even misery 
on the vanquished, as the Thessalonians did the Pen- 
estes. She did not apportion them by lottery to each indi- 
vidual, like the Clerotes of Crete. She kept them en masse, 



* "Slavery is the negation of polytheism, which has for its basis the Auto- 
nomy of all beings." New, just, and profound observation of L. Menard, 
Polytheism of Greece, p. 205. 



Greece. 



"3 



one body of people, but constantly degraded.* A thing 
horribly dangerous, which held the conquerors themselves 
in a strange condition of effort and tension, of war in time 
of peace, under the necessity of watching under arms, 
attentive to everything, and thus becoming terrible and 
almost inhuman. 

Laconia was a great manufactory, a people of indus- 
trious serfs who sold cloth, shoes, and furniture to all 
Greece. It was a great farm of agricultural serfs, who 
were contemptuously called Helotes or Heilotes, from the 
name of a wretched little town which was destroyed. They 
paid light taxes, so that, though workmen and laborers, 
they were quite easy, and throve under the outrage and 
ridicule of the others, who, through a special education, 
remained a distinct race. The Helote did as he pleased : he 
appeared almost like a freeman — free under the suspended 
sword — free — less the soul. The hardest thing for these 
unfortunates was that they were so much despised that 
the Spartans did not fear even to arm them. Each Spar- 
tan at Platea brought with him five Helotes. Even the 
children treated them disdainfully. Every year, at vaca- 
tion, they hunted them, watched them, and outraged or 
killed those whom they met isolated. 

Sparta, in this, as in all things, warred against nature. 
Her Lycurgus was the great danger. Her famous institu- 
tions, so little understood by the Greeks, show, save a 
little elegance, only the manners of the savage heroes of 
North America, the morals of so many other barbarians. 
From a distance this atrocious heroism of Sparta deceives. 
She appears a sublime monster. 

What shocks us the most is, that with a life so strained 
and of rude appearance, she had neverthelss a heavy 

* Pliny says: " The Lacedaemonians invented slavery." He means to say a 
servitude, till then unheard of among Greeks. This word, besides, was taken 
from the ancient Greek historian, Theopompus, whose words Atheneus 
quotes, adding: " The gods punished the Chians, who first imitated this exam- 
ple of buying men to make them servants, when others served themselves." 
8 



1 1 4 Bible of Humanity. 

Macchiavellianism, like an art of terror and of fatal torpor 
to weaken the Grecian cities. This art, very simple at 
the bottom, consisted in supporting in each city the 
aristocratic party. The best (Aristoi), the honest people, 
proud of the name of friends of Sparta, gradually stifled 
the free local spirit. This contest existed more or less 
secretly in each town. The people, driven to the wall, 
elected a tyrant, against whom the wealthy invoked the 
favor and the assistance of Lacedaemon, that magnani- 
mously interfered and established liberty. This is how she 
gained one place after another. Scarcely possessing two- 
fifths of Peloponnesus, she controlled it, and by degrees 
the whole Hellenic world. 

Now that Greece has accomplished her destiny, we can 
judge of all this much better than she could herself. The 
title of Sparta, that which was admired in her, was that 
she was able to keep free from the arts. She expended 
all her art to have no art. She declared that she knew 
how to fight, not to speak. She scarcely condescended 
to let drop a few rare oracles. She everywhere gave the 
ascendency to inefficient, idle men — to the dumb and indo- 
lent party, made up of the ancient families, and of the 
rich. She crushed the active crowd, the true Grecian 
people, clamorous, unsteady, restless, if you will, unbear- 
able, but prodigiously inventive and productive. 

Let us sum up. The contest was between war and 
art. 

Two things go to make us believe that the art, the 
Greek genius, would be fatally stifled. On one hand the 
disheartening, the fatigue of the public spirit, when rolled 
from crisis to crisis, between the factions, without being 
able to advance. On the other hand, the terror of those 
new forms of war, of those unheard of servitudes, the des- 
tiny of Messena and of Hela, the absorption of so many 
other towns. 

This was a heavy blow to the gods. The Moria } the 
hard destiny which divides men, as, after the pillage of a 



Greece. 115 

town, people share the captives, was the great deity. 
Under other names, the Parcae and Nemesis were indignant 
at the happiness of men. They appeared to have spread 
a heaven of brass — the hard snare in which the most just, 
wise, and skilful are caught. Any moment man may be 
ruined. The free and happy citizen may to-morrow, with 
all his possessions, women and children, bound under the 
spear, be exposed in the markets of Sicily or of Asia. A 
terrible belief prevailed, that the gods, far from being a 
providence to man, were his jealous enemies, and watched 
to surprise and crush him.* Hence an unexpected thing, 
not quite natural to Greece, very strange, melancholy. It 
is rare, exceptional. Nevertheless it may be seen in 
Theognis, and in Hesiod. They have but little hope. 
They fear much. Their wisdom is timid. Even in 
housekeeping and domestic economy, Hesiod followed 
the counsel of extreme caution. 

There is much earnestness in the Odyssey. Centuries 
separate it from the young smile of the Iliad. Through the 
trials of Ulysses, his dangers, his wrecks, the unjust hatred 
of Neptune, we always see the noble and helpful Minerva 
hovering near, ready to assist the shipwrecked. Minerva 
has disappeared in Hesiod, who expressly says that the 
gods are jealous of man, intent on undervaluing him, on 
punishing him for the least advantage he acquires, on re- 
covering from him all that through labor, through art, he 
has been able to conquer. 

In this poet, honest, of medium capacity, who aims in 
all things to be moderate, we are surprised, almost afraid, 
to find related the terrible legend of the great trial against 
the gods, the legend of Prometheus. 

The savior Prometheus was the municipality. The 
more man is abandoned by Jupiter, the more he should 
be to himself a vigorous providence. His Caucasus, not 

* See all the reunited texts in Ncegelsbach, and the important Theses of 
Mr. Tournier, Nemesis and the Jealousy of the Gods. (1863.) 



1 1 6 Bible of Human ity. 

of servitude, but of free energy, was the Acropolis of 
Athens, where all the world on the sea-coast, and the 
Ionian race, and the old tribes of Acheia, gradually 
rallied. 

Athens, more threatened than any other city, hav- 
ing the enemy before her very port, on an island, made 
wisdom apparent, smiling, but strong and terrible when 
necessary, harmonizing all genius, peace, war — liberty 
and law ; weaving, like Pallas, all the arts of peace, while 
the heroic flash darted from her powerful glance. The 
city, leading the city, was her law to herself. All doing 
everything ; each in turn magistrate, judge, soldier, pon- 
tiff, and mariner, for they manned their own galleys. 
"Then, was there no special forces?" Do not believe 
this. The soldiers were ^Eschylus, Socrates, Xenophon, 
Thucydides, and I know not how many geniuses. 

"But," says Rousseau, "this was painful; the slavery 
of some made the liberty of others. " Of Greece, Rousseau 
had read scarcely anything more that Plutarch, the Walter 
Scott of antiquity. He had no idea of the vigor of Athens, 
of her burning intensity of life. He imagined that the 
masters did nothing, but lived like our Creoles. It is quite 
the contrary. At Athens, the citizen reserved for himself 
what required strength — the heavy armor, the violent 
exercises ; and what is more astonishing, as we learn 
from Thucydides, the very rough trade of oarsman ! The 
Athenian rarely decided, and only in extreme cases, to 
entrust to slaves the vessels of the Republic and the dan- 
gerous honor of rowing against the enemy. 

This was the safety of Greece. Athens, by her vessels, 
striking everywhere unexpectedly, tired out the heavy 
Dorians. Pallas- Athene, from the summit of the Acropolis, 
watched the fury of Mars, and, as in the Iliad, knew 
well how to paralyze it. Athens had some allies very near 
Sparta— Arcadians, Achaians, the small town of Argolides, 
which formed, under Athens, a league, an amphictionary, 
on a neighboring island. Here was erected an altar to 



Greece. 117 

Neptune for the Greeks of the islands, of whom Athens 
gradually became the chief, for the common safety. 

This saved Sparta herself. What would she have done, 
flooded by Asia, without Themistocles and Salamis ? 

Education . — The CJiild. — Hermes. 

The human genius of Greece, and her charming facility, 
the magnanimity of Athens, shone forth especially in two 
things — the favor with which she welcomed the Dorian 
gods, and her admiring friendliness towards her enemy, 
Sparta. 

Athens invented ingenious fables in honor of those divini- 
ties — rude at first and half barbarous — the red Phoebus, 
with his deadly bow, and Hercules, the dull hero of the 
club. Minerva herself, who received Hercules at his 
birth, saved him from Juno. Later she watched and de- 
fended the Heraclides who had taken refuge at the hearth 
of Athens. Theseus, the friend of Hercules, was pro- 
tected by Apollo. The god of the day illuminated for 
Theseus the gloomy windings of the labyrinth of Crete, 
and saved the children whom the Minotaur would have 
devoured. Those children went yearly to thank him at 
Delos. 

In return, the Dorians, a little humanized, adopted the 
ancient religions, and the cherished gods of Athens. 
Sparta, in spite of her savage pride, adopted the Ceres 
of Attica. Hercules caused himself to be initiated at 
Eleusis by the goddess, and carried her mysteries to 
Sparta, but not her peaceful spirit. 

The blind prejudice of Tacitus against Germany, the 
French Anglo-mania of the last century, appears to 
meet in the strange infatuation of the great Utopians of 
Athens for rude Sparta. When they speak of her they 
are like children. The austere outside deceives them. 
Those silent Spartans, with great beards, wrapped in their 
miserable cloaks, coarsely nourished on black soup, keep- 
ing for themselves poverty, and leaving riches to the 



1 1 8 Bible of Humanity. 

serfs, appear to them wayward philosophers. They set 
them up as models. Plato, in his long witticism which he 
calls the Republic, copies and exaggerates even their ab- 
surdity. Xenophon borrows from them what he can for 
the romantic education which he ascribes to his Cyrus. 
The great Aristophanes praises Sparta and scoffs at 
Athens. Aristotle, so earnest at moments, imitates them, 
and, in so doing, he is no wiser than the others. 

It is true that when Aristotle reached the point of settling 
the high formula, decisive and true, of the commonwealth, 
he was decidedly anti-Spartan. He says that the com- 
mune, even in its unity, must not be less multiple, not 
composed of men of one kind, as in Sparta, but of" in- 
dividuals specifically differing," as at Athens.* Differ- 
ences which allowed the play of the various forces, the 
exchange of mutual services and benefits, the happy re- 
ciprocal action of all over all. Thus the State is for itself 
and for the individual the most powerful education. 

At the centre of motion we do not see the motion, we 
scarcely feel more than the fatigue. Those thinkers, in 
order to weave ingeniously the subtle thread of their long 
deductions, required the calm and the silence, which the 
agitated life of Athens scarcely afforded. They envied, 
as a sojourn of peace, the apparent harmony of Sparta, 
a contracted and terrible life, fixed in a deadly effort, in 
which their genius would have been paralyzed and made 
useless. 

In the false municipality, strictly one and monotonous, 
in which all would bear resemblance to each, the citizen, 
annihilated as a man, would live only for the State. The 
hero, who is the rich, free expansion of human nature, 
would appear there a monster, if perchance he could be 
produced. 

At Sparta every one was a citizen. Not one was a hero 
in the full sense of that term. 



* Aristotle: Politics, vol. ii., p. 90. M. B. Saint-Hilaire's edition. 



Greece. 



119 



Divine genius of Athens ! Her greatest citizens were 
heroes. 

This beautiful peculiarity is seen in other places besides 
Athens. In a less degree it is found in other towns. It 
is the glory of the Greek world, and it constitutes its 
joy. 

Strong through the Agora, the laws, the civil activity, 
the soul felt itself great and elevated, in a harmony even 
superior to the State : the Greek life. Through Homer, 
the games and the festivals, through the initiative of the 
divine educators (Hermes, Apollo, Hercules), the soul 
soared higher than the atmosphere of the local country, 
in the ether of liberty. 

Hence it came about that Greece, except in rare 
moments of trouble, had this beautiful attribute of human 
energy — which the East, and still more so the mournful 
middle ages, did not possess — the characteristic of the 
strong : joy. 

She had wings on her heels; nimble, sure of herself; 
through combats and unheard of labors, she was evidently 
gay, and smiled with immortality. 

Nothing endures. The State, this work of sublime art, 
will pass away. The gods will also pass away. Make 
man eternal. 

Man is the principal of all. Before the social organiza- 
tion, he was. After it, he will be. A day will come when 
nothing will be found of Sparta but briars ; of Athens but 
a few broken marbles. The Grecian soul, the light of 
Apollo, and the solidity of Hercules, will endure. 

This soul feels and knows that it is divine ; it was 
blessed at its birth, rocked by nymphs, and favored with 
goddesses. The child, on parting its lips, found the milk 
mingled with honey which a divine bee had deposited. He 
was born pure. Pure the maternal bosom.* It is said 

* The Greek woman, who can exercise the functions of the priesthood, is 
not the unfaithful Eve, credulous to the serpent, and fatal to her children, to 
whom ?he transmits the sin in the blood, and so ruins them all, except the 



120 Bible of Humanity, 

and repeated that Greece despised woman. It does not 
so appear to me. She was associated with the sacerdotal 
office. She was a Sibyl at Delphi, priestess at the great 
Mysteries, and pontiff in Iphigenia. 

This alone changed everything. The mother was pure ; 
nature was good. Consequently education was possible, 
a natural education, which for the infant was liberty 
itself. The infant was started, the career was opened 
to him, he was emboldened, he was launched. " Run. 
... Go in the light. The gods call thee and smile on 
thee." 

The East had no other education than its sacred disci- 
plines. The West had for its education the crushing of 
the memory. It carried the anterior, heavy worlds, which 
do not accord. 

Greece had an education. An education living, active, 
free, and not of routine. Education for herself, original, 
springing from her genius, and adapted to her. Educa- 
tion, in my opinion, of infinite value, because it was light, 
happy, and which, being life itself, was carried uncon- 
sciously, and without being burdensome. The robust per- 
son knew nothing of it. He marched with high head, he 
went on serenely. 

The insurmountable obstacle to the Oriental, priestly 
education, was the miracle. Miracle and education are 
deadly enemies. If a ready-made god, a living miracle, 
can come from heaven, the art of making him is useless, 
even rash and impious. What would such an education 
be but a daring attempt to create by human means that 
which only prayer could obtain from on high ? The idea, 
that God may any day descend and untie all the knots of 
earth, stupefies the Hindoo soul, whose activity becomes 

extremely small and imperceptible number of the chosen. The fable of 
Pandora has not at all the same bearing. Pandora does not corrupt genera- 
tions. The child is not impure before its birth, nor doomed beforehand. 
Education will not be, like that of the middle ages, Punishment, a discipline 
of severity, of whips, of tears, a preliminary hell. 



Greece. 121 

lost in fictions, and getting more and more childish, 
wears itself out in the doting Christmas carols of the child 
Chrishna. The infant-god extinguishes the infant-man. 

On the contrary, Greece, not quite credulous of mira- 
cles, does not trust the gods ; in her imagination she pre- 
serves her good sense. If she allows Jupiter to descend 
and create Hercules, it is on the condition that the hero 
will make himself still more a hero. Far from helping him, 
Jupiter is his obstacle — harsh, unjust toward him, submit- 
ting him to the tyrant Eurystheus. 

From the archaic periods Greece occupied herself with 
the child. But in her male ideal, she feared the tender- 
ness of the mother. For teacher and preceptor, Greece 
gave a hero to the hero. Achilles had for teacher Cheiron 
and Phoenix ; Apollo and Hercules are the pupils of Linus. 
These gods themselves, together with Hermes, are the 
teachers and the educators of Greece. They represent 
the three periods — the child, the adolescent, and the 
man. Happy outline, harmonious and gentle, which 
leaves full scope to natures so diverse. The young soul, 
with a free step, following the indicated path, from Hermes 
to Apollo, from Apollo to Hercules, will attain through 
Minerva the summit of wisdom. 

Greece had had Hermes, the god of the ancient races, 
for preceptor, educator. It was by a turn of dexterity 
and genius that she, transforming the new gods, reconciled 
them with Hermes, and confided the young men to their 
care. Hermes guarded the infant.* 

Hermes abandoned his solemnity, and was no longer 
dreaded as he had been in Arcadia. He was the amiable 
god of the public schools, of social intercourse, and of in- 
struction. He made himself exceedingly young, and 
became as a boy of sixteen or eighteen years of age, 

* In regard to Greek education, besides the high authorities of Plato, 
Xenophon, Aristotle {Politics), there are numerous texts collated in Cramer's 
History of Education, and especially in the Manual of F. Herman, vol. iii., 
2d Pt., p. 161. (Heid., 1852.) 



1 2 2 Bible of Humanity, 

nimble-footed, and winged. He was a delicate messenger, 
but not of the effeminate elegance of Bathyllus, except 
his beautiful hands. His hat and wand were winged ; and 
on the death of any person he flew with speed to the 
under world to mitigate the severity of their reception by 
Pluto. Yet he was always on the highway to direct 
travellers, and was ever to be found at the door of the 
Gymnasium. The youth, who had just left his mother and 
nurse, was intimidated on his arrival at the Gymnasium. 
Poor little one. It is the most momentous step of life. 
Yes, the Fall of man is to leave woman, and for the first 
time to approach a stranger. The charming young deity 
knows just how to reassure him. He is motion, diversion, 
language, and grace in the highest degree. The child is 
perfectly captivated with him, and entirely forgets the 
dull fireside, the fond mother, and the tender nurse. He 
knows nothing but the Gymnasium ; he dreams of it and 
of Hermes. It is his mother and his divinity. 

This god asked him precisely what his age demanded, 
what he loved, and would like to do. What ? Simply 
two things : gymnastics and music — harmony and action. 

Liberty and amusement, exercise and the sun — such is 
life. He browns and blooms. He soon obtains that 
slender plumpness which is indicative of agility, and which 
attracts the gaze of the gods themselves. It was delight- 
ful to heaven and earth. It was a holy work to exhibit 
beauty to the sky. In thanksgiving for her victory of 
Marathon, Athens ordered Sophocles, but fifteen years 
of age, the most beautiful of the Grecians, to lead a choir 
of boys, and to dance in the presence of the gods. 

The finest thing at this age is the race. True moment 
of masculine beauty ! Females of this age are awkward, 
and, I had almost said, sluggish. While the boy, al- 
ready a conqueror, is at the goal and laughing, the girl is 
still hesitating and getting ready. 

Happy child ! Hermes desires to do still more for him, 
and calls Castor to his aid. What prize will be given to 



Greece, 



123 



this victor ? Can you conceive ? A tripod of gold ? To 
him ? What would he do with it ? He blushes, he trem- 
bles, he is agitated in anticipation of what he is to receive. 
Never again will his heart beat so quickly ; not even on 
the day of his wedding, when the veiled maiden comes to 
him. A marvellous being that Neptune drew from the 
foam of the sea with a stroke of his trident, an animated 
tempest, but manageable, terrible and mild, ardent, 
darting fire from the nostrils and lightning from the feet 
. . . behold that which is to be given to him. He does 
not believe his own eyes. . . . When he is mounted on 
horseback, he and the horse move with the same soul. The 
heroic horse will go against the sword, although on the 
whole he is wise. In his most animated movements he 
exhibits moderation and judgment. He can follow with 
the young girls in the pageantry of the festival of the 
Panathcncea. Have no fear for the girl and the boy. The 
animal knows that the child he carries, although unsteady, 
is his friend. In the head of this most spirited of animals 
there is nevertheless an emanation of the moderation, and 
of the wisdom of Athens.* 

At this time it is well to be seated. It is noon. The cav- 
alier makes his repast on clear water and a few olives, and 
with them lunches on the Iliad. Each person remembers a 
portion of the epic, perhaps a canto of a thousand verses. f 
Each person has his favorite canto, his favorite hero. 

* See Xenophon, and a charming, exquisite book by Victor Cherbuliez, 
On the Horse (Geneva, 1S60), in which he explains, in an admirable manner, 
how the horse participated in the benignant education of the Athenians 
(p. 127). In the harsh middle ages there was no horsemanship (p. 128). The 
horse was treated like man. It was not trained, but used only as a drudge. 

\ This is the ordinary retentive power of moderate memories. It is so 
in Servia to-day. This extraordinary poem, the Iliad, was written out as 
soon as commercial relations were established with Egypt, when papyrus 
could be obtained; between 600 and 500 years B.C. There never was so 
instructive a poetry for the training of the energy of a people as that of 
Greece. The glory of it belongs exclusively to man. Olympus is so insig- 
nificant in it, that, when Achilles withdrew from the combat, Jupiter, to 



124 Bible of Humanity. 

The fiery esteem Ajax ; the gentle, Hector; the affec- 
tionate, the friendship of Achilles and Patroclus. From 
among these diversified characters they choose, they com- 
pare, they plead in behalf of this one or that one. Such 
is the true Grecian spirit. Some begin to speak. Hermes 
smiles. Behold those orators. The Gymnasium is an 
agora. 

Thus, very early, the language, in those young mouths, 
is formed and made pliant. True sons of Ulysses, they 
are born sagacious and inquisitive, acute of hearing, 
careful of good speaking, calculating. In their rivalries, 
and even in their rage, they aim to speak well, as though 
they were already thinking that eloquence is the queen of 
commonwealths, the mighty arbiter of combats more 
serious, to be decided to-morrow. 

This finest of human languages, compared with which 
all other languages are barbarous, is naturally so well 
made that he who uses it correctly, and follows it strictly, 
will, by it alone, attain his highest aims. Without speak- 
ing of its literary grace and melody, of its variety on all 
the chords of the lyre, notice these essential points : its 

counter-balance this hero, sent all the gods thither in one body. It never 
refers to the most ancient of Grecian antiquity. ^Eschylus is so much more 
pervaded with the spirit of the ancients, that he seems to be older than 
Homer. It contains, however, many things that are old and of great value. 
Also, many things that ?.re modern, and drawn with an admirable delicacy, 
as, for example, the coolness of the beautiful Helen, her indifference, when 
she thinks that Paris, or Alexander, who has been her lover for the last ten 
years, is about to be killed, and the thoughtlessness which makes her in- 
quisitive, and almost disposes her to return to the bed of Menelaus. There 
are also additions, entirely different in character, very coarse and very lament- 
able, and evidently inserted for the purpose of making the court of tyrants 
laugh, and for the amusement of the Pisistratides. In the xxi. canto of the 
Iliad, the gods pommel each other in a vile manner, and are as grossly 
insulted and reviled as in Aristophanes, but not with the same warmth, 
spirit, and profound sense. These blemishes do not prevent the young 
and strong Iliad, and especially the Odyssey, the poem of patience, the 
admirable, epopee of the isles, from being the most wholesome food for nour- 
ishing refining, and renewing the heart. They are the inexhaustible sources 
of eternal youth. 



Greece. 125 

power in deduction, analysis, and synthesis, and in expos- 
ing and facilitating every form of reasoning. 

This language was a logic, a guide, as a teacher without 
a teacher. In the Gymnasium, this language, refined and 
easy, invited to discussion. But, on the other hand, its 
remarkable clearness, simplified, elucidated the debates. 

A perfect language makes the mind serene, harmonious, 
peaceful ; dispels numerous prejudices of ignorance which 
engender hatred and perpetuate discord. Hence the great 
calmness, the charming docility, which we admire in the 
youthful interlocutors of Plato and Xenophon. This 
beautiful language was their Hermes, the amiable con- 
ciliator, and peacemaker.* 

Apollo. — Light. — Harmony. 

The most glorious day to the Grecian, at the age in 
which memory is strongly impressed with great things, 
was when he could join the sacred procession, which 
was sent to Delphi, and mingle in the crowd. This 
crowd was the greatest spectacle in the world. Twelve 
peoples at once, from all parts of Greece, even from 
hostile towns, marched peacefully, crowned with the 
laurel of Apollo ; and, singing hymns, ascended the holy 
mountain of the god of harmony, of light, and of peace. 

Delphi, as we know, was the omphalos, the centre of 
the world. To assure himself of this, Jupiter one day dis- 
patched from the poles two eagles, which met each other 
on the summits of Parnassus. All this country of rough 
rocks, of precipices, of obscure grottos, inhabited by 
spirits unknown to the earth, was, between the human 
countries of Thessaly and Boetia — a separate world, a 
savage sanctuary, which the gods had reserved for them- 
selves. At the entrance, in the defile of Thermopylae, 
was the dreaded temple of the ancient Demeter and her 



* See Steinthall and Baudry's Science of Language. (1864.) I shall 
return soon and often to this grand subject. 



126 Bible of Humanity. 

sombre daughter, who guarded the door of Greece. Over 
the narrow valleys, often black and deep, the rocks that 
crop out from the great chain in promontories, exhibit in 
the light, their eyries of eagles, which are towns, glistening 
fanes, and temples encircled with columns. 

The combats of the day and the dawn recall to the travel- 
ler or the excursionist that he is in the memorable places 
in which the glorious day-god, with his silver bow, van- 
quished the dragon of darkness, Python, whose noxious 
breath spread night and death. Apollo still sits in the 
place of his victory, over the rocks which witnessed it, a 
place of soothsaying and austerity, the aspect of which 
alone elevates, enlightens, and purifies the mind. 

A place less great than grand. In Greece everything 
is proportioned to the human compass. Parnassus is 
imposing without being gigantic, and, with its double sum- 
mit, is lord over the beautiful plane which extends toward 
the sea. From on high flows down Castalia, a fountain, 
pure and cold, of transparent water, worthy of supplying 
such a temple, chaste as the muses, and their god. Phce- 
bus is a celibate god. If he loved Daphne (the laurel), it 
was in vain. From that time he had but the two loves, 
of Melody and Light. 

Midway of the mountain, above the town of Delphi, the 
temple is poised in majesty. All around it is the sacred 
terminus, an enclosure filled with monuments, which all 
the Grecian peoples, and foreigners, in their acknowledging 
devotion, erected without order. There are a hundred 
little chapels, or treasuries, in which the Grecian States 
have placed their gold under the guard of the god. In 
irregular groups, there shone a whole people of marble, 
of gold, of silver, of copper, of bronze (twenty different 
varieties of bronze, and of all tints),* thousands of glori- 
ous dead, seat d, standing. Veritable subjects of the god 



* Quatremere \ Olympian Jupiter, p. 60, etc. In regard to this people 
of statues, and of Delphi in general, I follow the description of Pausanias. 



Greece, 127 

of light. By day all these statues resemble a volcano of 
blazing reflections which the eye cannot bear. At night, 
sublime spectres, they dream. 

Immortality is felt here, and the glory is palpable. It 
would be necessary for a young heart to be totally de- 
prived of the sense of the beautiful not to be affected. The 
first feeling is the benign disposition of the deities. The 
Grecian gods are on a level with the historical or mytho- 
logical heroes, without pride, on friendly terms. All have 
an expressive air of common relationship. Ulysses chats 
with Themistocles, and Miltiades with Hercules. The 
blind Homer is royally seated in the presence of standing 
gods. Pindar, with the sacred lyre, the triumphal robe, 
and pontifical decorations, again sings. Around him are 
those whom he has celebrated, the conquerors of Olympia 
and Delphi. Greece is grateful to them for the beauty 
which they displayed during their lifetime ; she thanks 
them for having, by the continuous work of the " human 
form divine," in admirable features, realized Hermes, 
Apollo, or Hercules, and who else? Pallas? Jupiter? 
Statuary perpetuated this, transmitted it in immortal im- 
ages, to preserve forever the very rapid flashes in which 
man for a moment saw the gods. 

When the eyes became somewhat accustomed to this 
splendor, having considered these divine heads one 
after another, exquisitely outlined on the deep azure 
of a pure sky, what must have been the impression 
of the Via Sacra, of the ascent to Delphi ! And what 
momentous words must the heart have heard from 
those silent mouths ! What delightful and forcible les- 
sons, and what encouragements ! From the victors of 
Olympia to their singer, Pindar ; from the great soldier of 
Marathon, ^Eschylus, to Aristides, and Epaminondas ; 
from the brave men of Platea to the seven Sages ! Strong 
and sublime chain in which the heart grew great. The 
heart well understood this lesson : " Draw near and fear 
nothing. Consider what we were, whence we originated, 



128 Bible of Humanity. 

and where we are. Do as we did. Be great in acts and 
in will. Be comely, adorn thyself with heroic forms and 
generous works which fill the world with joy. Work, 
dare, attempt ! A wrestler or a lyrist, a singer, an 
athlete, or a warrior, begin ! From the games to the 
combat, mount, oh youth ! " 

Greece, in her most fervent and most real worship, pre- 
served so much reason, such aversion for the absurd and 
incomprehensible, that instead of imparting the terror of 
the unknown, she marked the way by which the god was 
deified, the progress which placed him so high, and the 
various efforts, works, and benefactions through which 
he obtained his divine rank. A graduated ascent, not 
effeminate, but austere, was open to all. It may be ardu- 
ous and difficult, but there is no precipice, no leaping, no 
pointed rock, which prevents the steady ascent. The 
novice, entering the temple, before the imposing image, 
standing even in the presence of the deity, by no means 
forgot the popular narrations which the people made of 
the infancy of the god. Phcebus was born passionate, a 
severe god, revengeful. In' the savage Thessaly, where 
he appeared, his bow was often bent, and inflicted de- 
served punishment. The surly shepherd of Admetus, and 
rude artisan at Troy, whose wall he built, he had not then 
become the god of the Muses. Although originally a 
demi-barbarian and a Dorian, the Ionian genius and the 
Greek elegance adopted and invested him continually 
with divine attributes. The Athenians commemorated him 
at Delos. Every year the vessel, which brought back the 
rescued tributes of children, took them to their savior, 
Phcebus, whom they worshipped with the mystical dances. 
They danced before him the labyrinth and the conducting 
thread ; entangled and unravelled it. They acted even the 
infancy of Apollo, the deliverance of Latona, his much be- 
loved Delos, that rocked him in the midst of the waves.* 



♦Homer: Hymn to Apollo. "The Muses, answering with melodious 



Greece. 129 

Thus the god of the arts is himself a work of art. He is 
constructed by degrees, from legend after legend. He is 
on this account all the more dear and sacred. He acquired 
more and more the human heart, this large and benignant 
justice, which, seeing all, understands, excuses, acquits, 
and pardons. The suppliants, the involuntary criminal, 
victims of fate, even the truly guilty, had recourse to him. 
Orestes, despairing, appealed to him, when reeking with 
the blood of his mother, which his father had required 
him to shed. Closely following, pressing upon him, were 

voice, sing the gifts imperishable of the gods, and the sufferings of men ; who, 
with all they have received of the immortals, are unable, nevertheless, to pro- 
cure counsel and resources by which to keep off death and ward off old age. 
The fair-haired Graces also dance, and the Hours, Harmonia, Hebe, and 
Venus-Aphrodite, the daughters of Zeus, each holding the other's hands by 
the wrist. And with them sport Ares (Mars), and watchful Hermes ; and 
Phoebus-Apollo strikes the harp, taking grand and imposing steps. Both 
golden-tressed Leto (Latona) and deep-planning Zeus are delighted to per- 
ceive the mighty Mind (Noos), their dear son, thus sporting among the gods." 

M. Michelet is in error in imagining that the dance was for diversion. It 
was symbolical and imitative ; and Lucian declared it to be " a certain 
knowledge, an exhibition, a showing of things arcane {aporreta) to the 
mental faculties, and the expressing of things which are occult." The same 
writer describes the heavenly bodies as moving in like measures : " The dance 
of the stars in chorus, the concert of the planets in an established order, their 
united and harmonious movements together or by a single impulse, constitute 
the exhibition of the dance of the First-Born." 

The Amazons instituted the dance of the gods. Indeed they appear to have 
been the introducers of the worship of Demeter and the other Hippian 
deities into Greece ; Plato says that Eumolpus, who instituted the Eleusinian 
Mysteries, was their leader, and Clement instances him as one of the Hyk-sos 
of Egypt. Their country was called Assyria, and they built Ephesus, where 
they instituted the worship of Diana; also Smyrna, the birth-place of 
Adonis, and Paphos, where they worshipped the heavenly Venus. The wife of 
Cadmus was one of their number. Callimachus states that the queen of the 
Amazons had daughters, known as the Peleiades, who were the first to insti- 
tute the circular dance, and the Pannychis, or watch-night, or Nyktelian 
rites. It is evident enough, therefore, despite our author, that the Mysteries 
and other parts of the Grecian religion, whether Pelasgian or Ionian, were 
uniform with the Asiatic worship, and doubtless were introduced from Assyria 
and Phoenicia ; undergoing modifications only to conform it to the prevailing 
spirit of the people. Human sacrifices were offered in Greece on important 
occasions, and the rites were equally sanguinary as elsewhere. — Ed. 

9 



130 Bible of Humanity. 

the Eumenides. He heard the hissing of their whips of 
vipers. The merciful god descended from his pedestal 
and conducted the unfortunate to the town, which alone 
possessed an altar of mercy, the generous Athens, and 
committed his judgment to Minerva. The powerful god- 
dess, unexpected miracle, calmed the Eumenides, made 
those dreadful sisters sit down in quiet repose, who, till 
then, had wandered hither and thither over the earth, 
and filled it with terror. 

The worship of Apollo originated neither by accident, 
nor by the vague popular instinct. In its most ancient 
forms, it had the character of an institution of order, of 
humanity, of peace. At Delos, he was offered only fruits. 
The Athenians, during his festivals, allowed no capital 
executions. The games of Delphi, in their character, 
bore no resemblance to any other. They breathed the 
sweet spirit of the muses. The festival was inaugurated 
by a child. Beautiful child, wise and pure, kept worthy 
by his father and mother to represent the god. He was 
led in procession to the sound of lyres and citheras, into 
the groves of laurel which were near, where the young 
Apollo, with his virginal hand, cut the boughs of the 
sacred tree for the ornamentation of the temple. 

The contests were but a competition of lyre, of song. 
Above all was sung the victory of the god of light over 
the sombre dragon of night. Women, in the happy 
freedom of primitive Greece, mingled with the concourse. 
In the treasury of the temple was exhibited the gracious 
offering of a young maiden, who, against Pindar 
and other great poets, pleased the gods and won the 
prize. 

The only gymnastic exercises were originally those of 
the adolescent youth, whose age and elegance represented 
the god of Delphi. Veritable games and not struggles, 
foreign from the passionate violence of the combats of the 
athletes, which at a later period united with them. Still 
later, and in spite of himself, Apollo accepted the noisy 



Greece. 131 

races of the chariots, their tumult, the frequent bloody 
and tragical accidents, which they occasioned. 

All these were imported from abroad, as well as the in- 
toxication, the orgies of another worship ; as was also the 
flute with seven stops, the instrument of Phrygia, whose 
boisterous sound imposed silence to the lyre. The latter, 
weak and pure, had this superiority, that it did not drown 
the human voice. On the other hand it sustained it, embel- 
lished it, and marked for it its rhythm. It was the friend, 
the ally of the noble language in which Greece saw the 
superior sign of man ; the articulate, the distinct lan- 
guage.* 

The barbarian is the stammerer. Neither barbarians 
nor their gods spoke ; they howled, or blew through this 
instrument, which confused the mind and rendered the 
soul boisterous. It was at the sound of this flute, com- 
plicated, jarring, of lugubrious, tempestuous, and feverish 
effect, that men were led to the field of slaughter. The 
bloody orgies, which incited to violence, were abhorrent to 
the gods of harmony. 

As soon as the sacred ground of Delphi was touched, 
harmony entered the heart. Even the silence was full of 
music. On the plains and on the mountains, in the sacred 
woods, everywhere it was felt. In the temple, at the feet 
of the god, before his silent lyre, the sweet echoes of a 
heavenly concert were heard by every heart. At night, 
when the doors had been closed, there were heard outside 
the building melodious sounds, as though in those solitary 
hours the lyre was quivering vaguely, and vibrating with 
heavenly thoughts. 

But the great lyre of Apollo was Greece herself, recon- 
ciled by him. All the Hellenic peoples came before him 
and sacrificed together, mingling together their words and 
their souls. The distinctive dialects, the light Ionic, the 
grave and strong Dorian, the Attic, approached and 

* Homer : Meropes Anthropoi. 



132 Bible of Humanity. 

modified each other, as the worshippers communed 
together in the language of light* Light removes mis- 
understandings, is a powerful means of peace. It reassures 
and renders the soul serene. We scarcely hate, we never 
kill, the man with whom we can agree, in whom, through 
the ideas and the feelings common to all, we have found 
our proper heart. 

If anything could bring near together the people of the 
several States, and blend friends and enemies in one, it 
would be the witnessing before the peaceful altar, the chil- 
dren singing together, adorned with the fraternal laurel. 
Full of eager delight, the people contemplated this young 
world in which there was no hatred, nor even the knowl- 
edge of old dissensions. Even they themselves almost 
forgot them. They were enraptured with the charming 
spectacle of this future Greece, which was making its first 
endeavors, which was vying in strength and elegance, in 
grace and beauty. This spectacle lorded over everything, 
and banished every other thought, except those of admira- 
tion, of art, and of fraternal good-will. Some would even 
praise the sons of their enemies more than their own 
children. 

The effect was admirable. Each town sent with its 
young combatants, numerous deputations of grave men, 
who sustained them, and were umpires of the games. 
These deputies (Amphictyons) sitting together, constituted 
a considerable body, which seemed like Greece herself. 
In the controversies of either men or States, they were 
often umpires. The weak, the oppressed, voluntarily 
applied to them to intervene. Thus in time they became 
the supreme judges of Greece. They were considered as 
deriving their authority from the god. They sat at his 
altar, and spoke as in his name. They were also sup- 
ported by the dreaded authority of the two goddesses, 
Ceres and Proserpina, whom they honored at Thermopylae. 

* I give this designation to the Greek language. 



Greece. 133 

He who despised Proserpina died. This fortunate super- 
stition, very powerful at first, restrained and disarmed the 
unlike commonwealths that would otherwise have depopu- 
lated Greece. The oath of the Amphictyons appears to 
have been dictated by the horror inspired by recent 
exterminations, the utter extinction of the towns Helos 
and Messena. The Amphictyonic oath obligated the 
belligerents "never to destroy a Grecian town — and never 
to divert its running water. " In Greece, dry and cracked, 
where water soon disappears, it was regarded as the very 
life itself, and was placed, as in Persia, under the pro- 
tection of the gods. 

This was the prototype and exemplar, faint at first, but 
potent in its influence of fraternal federation of States, the 
great social lyre which, leaving to each chord its distinct 
independence and power, united them in friendship, de- 
stroyed discordances, and, in the event of unexpected 
hostility, was able, by a gentle ascendency, again to unite 
them in harmony. 

Nor was Apollo satisfied with this. Even on the thea- 
tres of the most cruel wars, in the fields still reeking, of 
the States of Peloponnesus, he tried to establish peace — 
at least the fleeting peace which the festivals and the 
games could give. He inspired the Eleans, to whom he 
appeared in a dream, to erect an altar to the god of their 
enemies, to Hercules, the tutelar god of Sparta. They 
obeyed. 

By a praiseworthy sacrifice of hatred and ill-will, the 
altar of the Eleans, every four years, united Greece at 
Olympia, as she was united at Delphi. Conquerors and 
vanquished, Grecians of the mountains and Grecians of 
the islands, Sparta and Athens went there, to honor their 
respective gods. For several days, at least, there was no 
war. This appeared so agreeable that they made a god 
of Truce itself. Amiable deity, who changed the minds, 
and often brought with him his daughter, Peace, the 
charming, the adored. 



134 Bible of Humanity \ 

These general festivals, and the particular festivals which 
were very nearly general, as the Panathencea of Athens, 
brought together an immense concourse. The roads were 
thronged with people, curious travellers, pilgrims, athletes, 
and strolling minstrels. Here, also, met the gods them- 
selves, who sometimes travelled,* and who were impor- 
tuned by one friendly town to honor another, or to pro- 
tect it from some scourge of pestilence or civil war. Great 
movement, reciprocal hospitality, commingling, exchanges 
of festivals and of ceremonies, of songs and of fraternity. 

Over the men and gods, over these crowds and festivals, 
over all this movement in which there was no jarring, 
three lights crossed and made the unity. To the inflamed, 
dusty splendors of Olympia, the subtle ether of virgin 
Attica responded. Over all hovered in divine charm, 
the warm, golden ray of Apollo. 

Hercules. 

Over this beautiful light of Delphi there still rests a 
shadow. I would remove it. It follows me. Is it cer- 
tain that the god of the day has forever vanquished, in the 
serpent Python, the old powers of night ? 

In the dark defile of the narrow valleys of Phocis, along 
the precipices, before the grottos of remarkable echoes, 
the fantastic figures of Pan always appear to me. Further 
off, in the country of the Centaurs, those monstrous forms 
still dare, at morning, at evening, to show themselves in 
the low meadows. Even at Delphi, in the temple, without 
respect for the lyre of the god, strange noises are heard, 
the barbarous timbrel, the Phrygian flute, the dull cries of 
intoxication and unworthy sobs. 

A witness, who cannot be disputed, tells us that when 
Greece was reassured by her great victory over Asia, 

♦Travels and hospitalities which drew the gods near, mingled them, 
gradually prepared the great divine unity, which Greece attained unaided, 
and without the need of any assistance from the East. See A. Maury, ii., 
28, On the Theoxemies. 



Greece. 



135 



another war, restrained hitherto, burst out with violence — 
that between the flute and the lyre.* 

The first, with great noise, was introduced everywhere, 
and with it the Horned owe of the East, god-goat, god-bull, 
and god-woman. This new-comer, Bacchus, had already 
glided into the Mysteries of Ceres, as her son, the inno- 
cent Iacchus. He grew great by the force of a fable 
which begot weeping, the child dead and resuscitated, f 
On this account he soon became the lord of the Mysteries, 
and even of Demeter herself. An unwholesome vapor 
appears to float about. All that nature had of secret 
storms, all that which a sick heart had of fever and of 
fancy, all that which the light of Apollo and the lance of 
Pallas had intimidated, got free and no longer blushed. 
Woman, whom the wars kept at the hearth, lonely and a 
widow, came forth from her home and followed Bacchus. 
The long robes were abandoned ; she ran about in the 
orgies with hair dishevelled and the bosom naked. Strange 
delirium ! What ? to weep for Bacchus, is this pointed 
iron, under the deceitful vine, necessary ? Are night and 
the desert necessary ; those races in the forest ; those cries 
and those sighs, while a mournful music covers with a 
fictitious grief their transports ? 

♦Aristotle: Politics, vol. i., p. 159. Ed. B. St. Hilaire. 

f Mourning was a characteristic of the Asiatic worship. The Egyptians be- 
wailed, with Isis, the murder of her husband and brother, Osiris ; the women of 
Syria, Palestine, and Phoenicia wept with Venus-Ashtoreth for the untimely 
death of Thammuz-Adonis ; the worshippers of the Syrian goddess Atargatis, 
or Rhea, lamented for her only-begotten ; and the Phrygians commemorated, 
with noise and a tumult of grief, the anguish of Cybele, the mag?ia mater, for 
Atys; the Samotracians deplored Cadmilus, or Hermes, slain by his brothers. 
Repeatedly do we find in the Hebrew writers a reference to this annual 
festival of Mourning for the Only Son. " Make the mourning as for the only 
son," Jeremiah vi. 26. "I will make it as the mourning for the only son," 
Amos viii. 9. "They shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they 
shall mourn for him as one mourneth for the only son ; and shall be in 
bitterness as one that is in bitterness for the first-begotten " (Protogonos), 
Zechariah xii. 10. The only son was the Syrian Bacchus, under whatever 
name, slain inopportunely, mourned, and finally, after three days, restored 
to life. In this particular the old religions were substantially alike. — Ed. 



136 Bible of Humanity. 

The same witness relates to us that the fury of the flute 
(i.e., of Bacchus), after the Median wars, invaded Sparta,* 
whose robust and mannish girls, neglected by the men, 
avenged themselves in love. They took a leading part in 
the orgies over the rough Taygetus. Athens was not less 
degraded by this folly. Everywhere the flute and frenzy. 
Everywhere the furious Thyades. Those of Athens even 
went in groups to Delphi, under the eyes of Apollo, and 
of the chaste muses, to carry off the girls of Delphi to 
take part with them in the frenzied enthusiasm. They 
ran about hither and thither all night, and did not return 
with them till morning, f 

The surrounding air is no longer the same. The savage 
virtue of Hippolytus, in which the conquerors in the 
games sought their sovereign energy, now flagged and 
softened. Those males are too proud to seek the females. 
They have an overwhelming contempt for the Bacchantes. 
Nevertheless, distressing miracle of Bacchus, this noise 
troubles, enervates, renders languid. It is like the atmos- 
phere before an impending storm, which oppresses. The 
thought wanders after them in the woods. ''Where do 
these Bacchantes go ? What do they wish ? I would not 
follow them, but I desired to know. ... Is it true that 

♦Aristotle: Politics, vol. i., 159. Ed. B. St. Hilaire. 
f " Fruitful Athens was aroused 
By the chorus of the sleepless Luaios : 
And many a group of revellers shouted ; 
The assembled multitude, with many-colored robes, 
Thronged all the streets ; and Athens everywhere 
Was covered with vine-leaves to honor him ■ 

Who causes plants to grow and fructify: 
Women placed iron on their bosoms, 
And bound phalli to their breasts, 
Thus celebrating the Mysteries. 
Young girls danced in sacred measures, 
And crowned their hair, braided upon their temples, 
With ivy- blossoms. The Ilissus carried to the city 
Water imparting prophetic powers, in honor of Dionysus ; 
And the revellers dancing on the shores of Cephissus 
Shouted aloud the Evian hymn."— Ed. 



Greece. 



*37 



the fawn, torn with their nails, is bitten with their teeth, 
that the warm blood in long draughts intoxicates them, 
swells their bosoms with love for this god-woman, who 
made them hate man, who made them put Orpheus to 
death?" 

What matters this to you, young man ? Rather go 
with me. Let us sit down at the feet of those heroes of 
bronze which the rising sun of Delphi emblazons. All the 
mountains are crowned with strong and pure light. Their 
summits, finely indented, as of polished steel on the 
azure, pierce the sky. One of these, calm and strong, 
which looks from on high, on all its neighbors of Thes- 
saly, triumphs in its glory. It is Mount CEta, the pile 
of Hercules. 

May the heroic legend strive against Bacchus ! May 
the good, the great Hercules strengthen this wavering 
young man, and keep him firm in the holy party of the 
Lyre. Hercules, who is generally regarded as coarse, 
knows nothing but the lyre. If he has occasionally been 
the rival of Apollo, he is all the more his friend. He is 
the hero of the West, whom the Eastern Bacchus, the 
furious one, persecutes.* 

Would you wish to know that which the noble god of 
the day needed to sustain him in waging this great war ? 
My son, it was pain, grief, death ; it was the funeral pile I 
Apollo, who is only light, could not descend into the dark 
kingdom. He had not struggled vigorously against death, 
against love. He had not undergone the misfortunes, the 
involuntary crimes, the expiations of Hercules, the flame, 
which when traversed, places him pure, and a conqueror 
in heaven. 

* It is lately, very lately, and only by Diodorus, that we learn of this 
hatred of Bacchus, who, on the whole, had a stronger grudge against Her- 
cules than had Juno. True and profound revelation, which simple good 
sense ought to have made us conjecture. It was a dangerous secret which 
no one would have dared to reveal so long as Bacchus was the master, and 
had under his command an army of the initiated. A single word dropped by 
jEschylus put him in danger. 



138 Bible of Humanity. 

But what Apollo most needed was work. He had tried, 
he even became a mason ; but his hands, too soft, would 
have been compelled to abandon the lyre, and could not 
have felt any more its delicate strings. He left to others 
the labors, the sweat ; the race to the winged feet of Her- 
mes ; the struggle to the arm of Hercules — the despised 
works in the great struggle against the earth. He left 
the better part, perhaps, to Hercules, my son ; the hard 
labor, the great viaticum of life which keeps it serene and 
strong. The ethereal art, the muse, are these enough ? 
I doubt it. Are they sufficient to sustain us against the 
assaults of nature ? No. Believe me, the fatigue, the 
labor, of all the hours are necessary. I am thankful for 
this. It has served me, led me, better perhaps than any- 
thing else. I shall die rich in works, if not of great re- 
sults, at least of great purposes. I lay them at the feet of 
Hercules. 

There were a hundred heroes in Greece, but only one 
whose exploits were LABORS. Strange, astounding fact ! 
Greece has such strong, good sense, a reason so marvel- 
lously adequate, that even against her prejudices — the 
scorn of labor which she calls servile — her great deified 
hero is emphatically the WORKMAN. 

Consider that it is not a question of elegant, noble, or 
altogether heroic works, but, of course, that which was 
vile and unclean. The magnanimous goodness of this 
hero, however, considered nothing base which was of 
benefit to mankind. He fought hand to hand with 
marshes and poisonous hydras. He compelled rivers 
to aid him ; here dividing them, there uniting them in 
those stables of Augeas which he flooded, swept, and 
purified. What could the bow of Apollo have done here ? 
In order to destroy Python forever something more than 
arrows were necessary. Perseverance and the humble 
heroism of Hercules were necessary. 

The great deliverer of the Persians, as we have seen, 
was the blacksmith. Gustasp, their great hero, in making 



Greece. 139 

choice of a trade, selected that of the smith and the anvil.* 
But the iron ennobles. The hammer is an arm as well as 
an implement. Persia would not have dared to give her 
hero so low a place. The Grecian genius is so bold, so 
free, and free of itself, that it has not feared to debase its 
Hercules, and he becomes greater by his debasement. It 
realizes the Persian ideal better even than Persia was able. 
A benefactor of the earth, Hercules purifies and embel- 
lishes it. He banishes its morbid torpors. He compels 
it to work, and creates fruitful fields. He pierces the 
mountains ofThessaly, and the stagnant waters are drained 
away. Behold a paradise, the valley of Tempe.f Every- 
where pure and rapid waters, large and safe roads. He is 
the workman of the earth ; the artisan who fashions it for 
the service of mankind. 

This conception of Hercules astonishes on every side. 
It greatly excels both the Iliad and the Odyssey. Her- 
cules has the fury of Achilles, but greater goodness. When 
he has done evil, he repents, and repairs it. His heroic 
simplicity removes him far from Ulysses. This perfect 
Grecian of the islands, so deceitful, is very far from the 
immense heart of Hercules. By land and sea Ulysses 
looks for his little country ; Hercules for the great, and 
wishes the welfare of all, the establishment of order and 
justice over all the earth. Hercules is the great victim, 
the living accusation against the order of the world, and 
the despotism of the gods. His mother, the virtuous 

* Shah Namch. 

f A similar tradition exists in Cashmere. Humboldt states " that its prim- 
eval name was Casyapamar, signifying the habitation or Casyapa, a mytho- 
logical personage by whose agency the valiey was drained." Indeed, the par- 
allel holds much further. The population of that region, the Candaharians, 
seem to reappear in the Centaurs of Thessaly ; both agreeing in custom as 
much as in name. They procured their wives by carrying off virgins by 
force ; they doted on horses ; their chief bore the title of Charon or Cheiron. 
Hercules, who is the hero of so many exploits in and about Thessaly, is ap- 
parently a Heri-culyus, a lord, or protector of the people, whose cause he 
champions and vindicates. — Ed. 



140 Bible of Humanity, 

Alcmena, faithful as a wife, intended her son to be legiti- 
mate, but he was, instead, a bastard. Conceived the first, 
he was born a cadet to the inferior estate of a younger 
son, by the injustice of Jupiter. At length he became a 
slave, the slave of his elder brother, the feeble, the dastard 
Eurystheus. A domestic slave and sold ; he was slave to 
his strength and to the intoxication of blood. He was 
the slave of love, because he had nothing else here below. 

His enormous strength was his fatality. He was not 
adjusted to the feebleness of the world. Often, when he 
intended to touch lightly, he killed. This benefactor of 
men, magnanimous defender of the oppressed and feeble, 
lived overwhelmed by involuntary crimes, repentances, 
and expiations. 

He was depicted as small, squat, and very black. He 
was possessed of the kind heart as well as the strength 
of the black man. Antar, the Arabian Hercules, is black. 
In the Rdmayana, the Indian Hercules, Hanuman, so 
good, so strong, who carried the mountains, is not even a 
man. 

Thus, everywhere, the popular instinct has taken for 
its hero the lowest, the most humble, the victim of des- 
tiny. The consolation of the oppressed crowds is to op- 
pose the grandeur of the miserable and of the slave to the 
severity of the gods — Hercules to Jupiter. 

Legend of the inferior tribes, touching but sublime and 
facetious. Hercules is made after their image. He has 
enormous appetite. He eats an ox. But he is kind- 
hearted; he allows the people to laugh at him. He likes 
to laugh himself. When he had taken alive the terrible 
boar of Erymanthus, which Eurystheus required of him, 
he bound him, he carried him bristling, the black head 
showing the white teeth. The King, affrighted by such 
a gift, fled from his throne, and hid himself in a cask 
or cellar of brass. One imagines that he is reading the 
German scene of the bear which, in the Niebelungetiy Sieg- 
fried amusingly unloosed. 



Greece. 141 

Hercules, being force itself embodied, the strongest of 
men, the Dorians adjudged him to themselves, and made 
him the ancestor of the Kings of Sparta. But he is just 
the opposite of the Spartan temper. He is the man of 
mankind, beyond the exclusive egotism of a State so com- 
pletely wrapped up in itself. 

He went among the Athenians, who graciously assured 
him that at his birth Minerva had received him in her 
arms. They established him at Marathon. They made 
him the friend of Theseus. Nevertheless his legend is far 
from being Athenian. He humiliated Athens in saving 
Theseus from the domain of Hades. He is appropriately 
the hero of the country of the Athletes, of the good and 
the valiant Boetia, very unjustly despised by Athens, the 
rural country of poets and of heroes, of Hesiod, of Pindar, 
of Epaminondas. He is a Theban, unless he came from the 
strong Argos. He grew great around Elis and Olympia, 
in their rich plains. When young he fought in the dense 
forest of Arcadia. He was the adopted child of those 
of whom but little is said ; of inferior tribes which the city 
eclipsed ; of a Greece less brilliant, but strong and gener- 
ous, which had less of art, and perhaps more of heart. 
This obscure, voiceless world survives in Hercules. 

Three or four alluvions of ancient races, in some way 
superposed, exist together in this young god, who ap- 
peared very late in mythology. The Pelasgians had not 
all gone, nor the glorious Achaeans, who conquered Troy. 
The subjugated masses who cultivated Thessaly, who per- 
formed the labors under the name of Hercules, were cer- 
tainly extant, and probably contributed to form the great 
legend. 

Hercules, in his statues, has the traits of the Athletes, 
the striking disproportion between the chest, enormously 
large, and the head, very small. The same inequality 
appears in his moral nature. He partakes qualities in com- 
mon both with god and the beasts. When the inhuman 
judgment of Jupiter declared to him that he, the strongest 



142 Bible of Humanity. 

of the strong, must become the slave of the coward, he 
fell into a terrible frenzy, and went mad with grief. He 
no longer recognized his children, but imagined them to 
be monsters, and killed them. Yet he was the mildest 
among men, and the most submissive to the gods. Without 
a domestic hearth, without family, he began, from the 
moment of his recovery, the great solitary, arduous, and 
prolonged labors which were to save mankind. 

The first of these labors was peace, which he, by his 
own arm and prowess, established all over Greece. He 
strangled the monsters, the hydras and lions of the old 
world. The new tyrants, the brigands, felt the weight of 
his club. The dangerous forests, the gloomy defiles, 
became safe ; even the untamed rivers were vanquished, 
confined, and compelled to flow in their channels. They 
became highways. Greeks now freely communicated 
together, and assembled at Olympia, where Hercules 
had established before the altar of Jupiter the contests of 
peace, superseding the old bloody conflicts. He himself 
taught the exercises which made others resemble him, 
which created calm heroism, which built up the inde- 
structible man, and made him firm like iron in the service 
of Justice. No violent competition, no animosity, was 
permitted. The olive was the only crown which he gave 
to the conquerors in those games. 

Greece was too small. Hercules set out for a larger 
field of achievement. He wished to extend the peace which 
he had established, to institute everywhere the new rite. 
The ancient custom on every shore was to immolate the 
foreigner. At Tauris, a virgin cut his throat at the altars. 
In Thrace a barbarous King threw men to furious horses, 
glutted them with human flesh. In the north, the cruel 
Amazons made light of the blood of males. The same 
ferocity in Africa, where Busiris gave to the shipwrecked 
the hospitality of death. At the extremity of the world, 
in Iberia, Geryon devoured men. These were the adver- 
saries of Hercules, who searched for them beyond the 



Greece. 



H3 



seas, found them, captured them, and dealt with them as 
they had dealt with their guests. The law of hospitality 
was established from Caucasus to the Pyrenees.* 

Hercules boldly entered the adytum or sacellum of the 
mysteries which made the strength of the barbarians. He 
faced the gloomy sea of the north, sanctuary of storms, 
which no one dared to enter — the turbulent, inhospitable 
Black Sea. He called it Euxine (hospitable). The queen 
of the frightful shore, the Amazon Diana of Birmo, was 
subjugated, like the sea itself. He forcibly carried off her 
belt, and hence her ferocious pride. Before him nature 
everywhere lost her virgin >avageness. At Gades he 
broke the old barrier ; with a shove of his shoulder he 

* Jacob Bryant, in his Analysis of Ancient Mythology, proposes a more 
intelligent explanation of this custom. The practice of offering human sacri- 
fices, common alike to Greece, Rome, Asia, Africa, and Europe, was denoted 
by these customs. In Hebrew story, Abraham was commanded to sacrifice 
his "only son ; " the book of Leviticus provided for such cases, and Jephtha 
is said to have actually immolated his daughter. Erectheus, at Athens, Marius, 
the Roman consul, and the Carthaginians, when Agathocles besieged them, 
sacrificed their children to propitiate divine power. The worship of the 
goddos Hippa, the antitype of Cybele, Astarte, Iris, and Demeter, was 
thus characterized. Hence Diana at Tauris, the same as Brimo, was so 
worshipped ; the Black Sea was called Axcuns, for this cruelty to strangers, 
who were put to death in preference to citizens ; Diomedes, the Thessalian, 
cast strangers to his horses, or rather gave them to the hippai, or priests of 
Hippa, for sacrifice ; the Amazons, who worshiped Mars and Diana, and insti- 
tuted the rites of Ceres in Thebes and Attica, were Oiorpata, or immolators 
of human beings ; a man was annually torn in pieces and his flesh tasted at 
the orgies of Bacchus, till an animal was substituted ; and in Crete, Sicily, and 
elsewhere, the priests were disciplined in boxing and other athletic exercises, 
that they might overcome strangers and visitors, and have a pretext for im- 
molating them. The stories of Polyphemus, Busiris, Antaeus, Eryx, Cycnus, 
Andromeda, Lycaon, Echetus, Geryon, the Sirens, and Lasstrygones, and 
doubtless all cannibalism, were examples of this practice. Indeed Hislop, in 
his Two Babylons, derives the term "cannibal" from cahen, a priest of Baal, 
the sun-god of the Hamitic nations, who was worshipped by such offerings. 
It was believed that the gods hungered for blood, and could not communicate 
with man till it had been tasted or inhaled by them. It is still a custom in 
Africa, and certain islands of the Pacific, to immolate all strangers and 
criminals ; and the practice of capital punishment, which is still preserved, is 
a relic of the old pagan rite. — Ed. 



144 Bible of Humanity. 

parted two worlds, opened the strait. By him the small 
Mediterranean became the woman of the great ocean, and 
turning its back to Greece looked towards the distant 
Atlantis.* Its azure, salt wave, emancipated, bounded 
in this immensity which the heaven of Homer had not 
seen. Olympus was surpassed. What will become of 
the gods ? 

This rash one did not stop. The gloomy infinity of the 
Celtic forest did not affright him. He entered into its 
depths. He penetrated the glaciers of the Alps, the eter- 
nal desolation. He laughed at the black firs, he laughed 
at the avalanche. Through this place of terror he made, 
without difficulty, a highway, the great thoroughfare of 
mankind. Henceforward all, even the feeblest, the poor, 
women, old men, bowed over their sticks, follow without 
fear the high road of Hercules. 

He had accomplished mighty achievements. He left 
behind him enduring monuments. He thought it time 
to be seated and to rest himself at the base of ^Etna, 
at the foot of the great altar which smokes eternally. 
He breathed, he peacefully contemplated the blessed, 
sacred fields, always adorned with the flowers which Pros- 
erpina gathered, and he thanked the goddesses. His 
heart vibrated with joy. In his heroic simplicity, always 

*An accomplished writer, not a professional geologist, suggested to the 
editor, in a private letter, that perhaps at a former era a salt sea extended 
through Middle Asia, dividing Scythia and the Turanian or Tartar races from 
those of the South and West. This would, if true, account for the exist- 
ence of salt lakes and deserts in that region, as well as for the fact that the 
Tartar races are not known in the Hebrew and other old records. If the 
Mediterranean, by some convulsion, forced its outlet to the Atlantic, thus 
draining away that region and reducing a continuous body of salt water to 
lakes and barren deserts, the hypothesis would be a probable fact. The Dead 
Sea was a part of the Red Sea, ages before Abraham, Nimrod, or King Menes ; 
and Lower Egypt was a part of the Mediterranean. Hercules was actually a 
Libyan and Phoenician, rather than an Aryan or Grecian divinity. His name 
was the Sanskrit synonyme of Melkarth, and he held no place among the di- 
vinities of Olympus. The Grecian Herakles was probably another divinity, and 
probably was the appropriate deity to innovate upon the order of things. — Ed. 



Greece. 145 

free from pride, he pronounced this sentence: " It ap- 
pears to me that I have become a god." * 

The gods had waited up to this moment. Nemesis 
heard him.f This savage goddess and her ominous genius, 
Ate, fly incessantly over the whole earth and gather the 
imprudent words of prosperity. The cry of boldness or 
of audacity which unluckily mounts to our lips gives to the 
jealous ones on high a pretext to punish us. They allot 
to men, but with niggardly reserves.}: They give little 
and withhold much. They release certain favors while they 
limit, refuse the surplus, the too-much^ the excess. This 
too-much is the glory, the genius, the greatness of man — 
that by which he can become a god, and it is that which 
the gods withhold. Daedalus, Icarus, and Bellerophon 
were punished for having taken wings. In Homer, the 
too bold, too happy ships were changed into rocks by 
Neptune. Was not the good and pious ^Esculapius struck 
by lightning for having saved man's life ? 

Hercules was still more culpable ! He had forced Terra 
Mater, the charming and venerable mother of men and 
gods. It is in vain that he says he did it out of love ; that 
by piercing its mountains and draining its marshes, by 
rooting out the black tufts of its humid forests, he eman- 
cipated Ceres. The earth remains disturbed on account 
of it. If formerly, according to the fable, Ceres wept by 
reason of the assaults of Neptune, how much deeper her 
indignation against Hercules, who is only mortal ? But 
is he only mortal ? Is this bold one, with his superhuman 
labors, mortal ? This is what it is essential to know. 
Between the old outraged deities of earth and the jeal- 
ousies of the young Olympians a strange covenant is 

* These sublime things, although only found in Diodorus and other writers, 
comparatively modern, are certainly ancient traditions, or rather adaptations 
of the older Phoenician legends of their Fire-god and tutelar deity. 

f Nemesis, or Afoira, signifies distribution, division. 

\ There is nothing more instructive on this subject than the treatise of Mr. 
Tournier : Nemesis and the Jealousy of the Gods. 1863. 
10 



146 Bible of Humanity, 

made. The last-born, Bacchus, an illegitimate brother 
of Hercules, undertakes his ruin. What says Jupiter ? He 
allowed him to act — to test his son ? or, was it from ill-will 
against humanity, too bold ? He yielded to his favorite 
Bacchus ; he yielded to the gods. Hercules must die. He 
must be convinced that he is mortal. 

The effeminate Bacchus, who passed his life in long 
robes, in the half-sleep of an indolent woman, dared not 
face Hercules. He went to find the Centaurs. This odd 
race, of indomitable fury and strength, had sprung from 
a strange mother, the Cloud, inconstant deity, sometimes 
like smoke or fugitive fog, sometimes pregnant with 
lightnings, filled with thunder-bolts, of an elasticity more 
terrible than the thunder-bolt itself, and of such formidable 
expansion as to hurl mountains to the sky. The sons of 
the Cloud, the Centaurs — unbridled horses in their lower 
parts, hasty, of furious rut — are men of folly, of caprice, in- 
flammable as their mother. Moreover, through her magic, 
they had something of the coarse phantoms of the middle 
ages, monstrous apparitions, fantastic terrors, bad dreams, 
frightful nightmares, which frenzy and make mad. 

A people sq much the more dangerous because they were 
very diverse, of contradictory spirits. Cheiron was a wise 
one ; another, Pholus, a good Centaur, was the host of Her- 
cules and his friend. It was Pholus, simple and credulous, 
that Bacchus deluded. He brought to him a terrible drink 
(the brandy of the savage ?), and told him not to open the 
cask until the day that he entertained Hercules at his 
house. Scarcely had the cask been pierced before the 
vapor spread itself. All the Centaurs were delirious. 
Pride ? Hatred ? or Envy ? Vain and light folly ? What- 
ever may have been their thoughts, they flew into a pas- 
sion, they assaulted the peaceful Hercules. The rocks fled, 
the forests were uprooted and flourished in the air, the 
oaks of a thousand years were brandished. Horrible hail- 
storm ! The firm hero, with his calm, stout heart, was 
not dismayed. He responded with advantage, and hurled 



Greece. 



H7 



back at them their oaks and rocks, but with an arm much 
more sure. The earth was strewn with the bodies of those 
monsters. At evening all was over. No one has since 
seen the Centaurs. Not having been able to ensnare him, 
to assassinate him, the gods sentenced him. He must 
undergo everything. Jupiter decreed, Eurystheus an- 
nounced it. lie must die in obedience. The tyrant an- 
nounced to him the fantastical wish that he should go to 
the underworld, and bring back to him the three-headed 
dog. Bitter derision towards a mortal, who could only 
obey by entering the world of death, with the hopeless- 
ness of being able to do no more, not even obey. 

How bitter is death ! But especially for the strong, 
for those who feel in themselves all the energies of life ! 
Death is deliverance to the feeble and the sick. Her- 
cules, the most alive of the living ! for him it must be an 
enormous effort to submit to die. We see that in his 
heart he would say : " Suffer this cup to pass from me ! " 
but he does not. He goes in search of Ceres, the be- 
nign and forgetful ; and having been initiated into her 
mysteries, he humbly prays her to strengthen him. 

He visited again the places of his youth, of his first ex- 
ploits, in that Thcssaly where he had created Tempe. 
The king Admetus, though he was overwhelmed with 
sorrow, received him as a guest, and bid him welcome. 
Hercules learned that the Queen Alkestis, in order to 
save her dying husband, and to preserve to her son a 
father more useful than herself, had embraced death, and 
bravely descended into the gloomy kingdom of Pluto. 
Hercules was moved. This great deserted palace, the 
husband in despair, the son drowned in tears, a whole 
people around a grave, all this pierced his great soul. He 
no longer thought of death. He would go to Hell, the 
world of the dead, face Pluto, vanquish death, bring back 
to the husband the adored spouse. Admirable folly of 
compassion ! But the strongest are the most tender- 
hearted ! 



148 Bible of Humanity, 

In all this legend little has been said of Minerva. But 
luckily she followed him. It was not in vain that at his 
birth she received him from the womb of his mother. 
Minerva, at the solemn, decisive moment, reappeared. I 
am now reassured. Behind the sublime folly I see the 
eternal wisdom. 

He went to Taenarus, he descended into Hell. Hell was 
afraid of Hercules. Cerberus came to lick his feet. 
Pluto was amazed ; but Proserpina took the part of the 
bold hero. Pluto consented. He let him go, — let him 
triumph over death ! Hercules did not ascend from Hell 
alone. A veiled woman accompanied him. She also 
entered her home, the house of Admetus. He did not 
suspect her identity, but rejected her. But immediately 
the veil was removed ! Enough ! let us not describe this 
unique scene, which no one can read without weeping. 

What is hell, the underworld, henceforth ? A trifle. 
We laugh at it. The Furies have been frightened. Cha- 
ron has obeyed ; a living person has passed and repassed 
on his boat. Cerberus, in a cowardly manner, his tail 
between his legs, crest-fallen, followed the conqueror, 
but, at the sight of light, disappeared. The brother of 
Jupiter, the King of the ghost-world, and of Tartarus it- 
self, has been outraged with impunity, and appears, in 
these days, to have withdrawn into the profound abyss, 
the doubtful fog of the great deep. Great, terrible blow to 
the gods, who will surely avenge themselves. This last 
victory brought inevitable misfortune to Hercules. 

Strange destiny ! His only impiety was that he was 
worthier than Olympus. His gentleness of soul, his mag- 
nanimity, had led him to avenge the outrage which had 
been received by the wife of Eurystheus, that unrelenting 
persecutor, that cruel tyrant over him. The gods of 
Homer were disparaged, humiliated, by this contrast. 
Such excessive virtue had been never heard of among 
them. 

The maxim, "Render good for evil/' which was en- 



Greece. 149 

joined on the old monastic East, is perhaps too easy 
to the feeble. But that Hercules, the strongest of the 
strong, should exhibit this extraordinary goodness, is 
novel and marvellous. It is the very heaven of the Greek 
genius. The heaven of the heart destroys the heaven of 
the imagination. 

Hell, the underworld, Olympus, all the gods have 
sunk in this contrast: one thing remains, the greatness 
of man. 

Well, if thou art a man, it is by that that thou wilt be 
assailed. Thy courage is invulnerable, but not thy love, 
not thy friendship. At first Hercules lost his brother, 
whom he loved. He lost the companion of his labors, 
the courageous friend who followed him everywhere, who 
bore his arms. Henceforth he must go alone, and fight 
alone over the earth. 

The strong are very sensitive to pain, and allow them- 
selves to be afraid of it. Hercules had once been deliri- 
ous ; and, after his descent into hell, when he had been in 
the very presence of Death, his head was disturbed. His 
heart, full of grief and trouble, invoked relief from the 
dangerous physician, Love, who scoffs at our ills. He 
yielded to Love, and followed meekly as a bull blindly 
goes to meet the deadly blows. He loved Dejanira, the 
dangerous and the jealous. He loved Iole, and found 
nothing to come from such a love but outrage. The 
brother of Iole repelled the bastard, the serf of Eurystheus ; 
he irritated Hercules, who killed him. Frightful misfor- 
tune ! He was inconsolable. He pined away, he drooped, 
and, sick, he went to consult Apollo. This was the se- 
vere oracle : " Pay them the price of blood ! " 

11 But I have nothing in the world ! " 

"Thou hast thy body. Sell thyself as a slave in 
Asia." 

Hercules obeyed. In this indolent Asia Minor, in this 
effeminate Lydia, where man is a woman, he had not a 
master but a mistress, a woman, the Queen Omphale. Was 



150 Bible of Humanity, 

not this enough ? No. The fable adds that, by a double ser- 
vitude, his soul was also enslaved, wretched by loving the 
cruel woman, who amused herself with him. She exhibited 
the deplorable spectacle of Hercules disguised, Hercules 
in the garb of a woman ; most terrible burlesque ! Men 
were horrified at the sight, but she laughed pitilessly, and 
exacted, in order to complete the humiliation, that her 
slave should work cheerfully, that he should spin, and ex- 
hibit himself to all less as the captive of an overmastering 
fate, than of a dastardly love, and of a feeble heart. 

So men and women laughed, and Olympus sang. Her- 
cules was delivered, only to suffer still greater calamity. 
He returned to Greece, and rejoined Dejanira. After such 
misfortunes, the humiliated heart willingly hides itself in 
love and solitude. He took her into the desert. But, on 
the road they met with a strange adventure. A river debar- 
red the way. A young Centaur, the only one who had 
escaped destruction, offered himself to carry Dejanira over 
the stream. Did he wish vengeance ? or was he, accord- 
ing to the blind instincts of his race, mad for Dejanira ? 
It is not known. Having landed her on the bank, Her- 
cules still being on the opposite shore, he proceeded to 
satiate himself with her. Hercules had his terrible arrows, 
poisoned with the Hydra of Lerna, and yet he hesitated, 
fearing to wound Dejanira. At last he let speed the arrow, 
pierced the monster, who, in the double crisis of pleasure 
and of death, pouring out his life, love, rage, mixed with 
infernal poison, violently tore off his soiled tunic, and said 
to Dejanira, "Take this. It is the soul of Nessus. In it 
is love and the eternal desire." 

This caused the death of Hercules. He soon after put 
on this murderous tunic, having received it from his too 
artless spouse, who expected to be loved the more. The 
horrible poison burned in him. In despair, he refused to 
wait for death. He anticipated it. He enfranchised him- 
self, and threw aside his tormented body in which he had 
done so much, suffered, undergone the humiliating miseries 



Greece. 



151 



of our nature. He made, with trees heaped up on Mount 
CEta, a colossal funeral pile, and desired his last friend to 
apply the torch. 

He was enveloped by the flame and ascended. It is 
said that he ascended to heaven. But what heaven ? 
Was it Olympus ? His very career had killed the Olym- 
pians. 

What is added, and what is certain is that Hercules 
espoused Hebe, the goddess of eternal Youth, in other 
words, he lived and remained young. Two or three thou- 
sand years are of no consequence. Other mythologies 
have been introduced. Other saviors have varied the 
great, eternal theme of the Passion. The incarnated 
(avatar as) of India had for their Passion to go through 
human life and to experience its miseries. Those of 
Egypt, of Syria, and Phrygia, the Osirises and Adonises, 
the Bacchuses, the Atyses, the mutilated gods were torn 
to pieces, suffered, and endured. But their passive Pas- 
sion, far from giving us strength, has been discouraging, 
and their legends have created sterile inertia. It is in 
the active Passion, the Herculean, that there is the exalted 
harmony of man, the equipoise, the strength which makes 
him fruitful here below. 

Persia had this intuition, but vague, quite elementary. 
The Grecian Hercules was exact, strongly marked, and 
of such a positive personality that we can portray him 
much better than the historical heroes. His compact 
solidity placed him apart from all the gods, and it is he 
who, by contrast, makes us feel their transparency. As 
to the restless Bacchus, who disputed the ground with 
Hercules, he is lost in the troubled vapors of night, of or- 
gies, the reeky exhalations of the East. 

The shadow of Hercules, the remains of Hercules, his 
remembrance, his Olympian lessons, these accomplished 
the great and substantial realities — Platea, Marathon, Sala- 
mis. 

But that which made him survive in Greece, and consti- 



152 Bible of Humanity. 

tuted him the spouse of the goddess of eternal Youth, the 
young and the living, and the hero of future time, was his 
humble and sublime part of laborer, the heroic workman. 

He dreaded nothing, he disdained nothing. In estab- 
lishing the sacredness of peace between man and man, he 
civilized the world ; in piercing the mountains, emancipat- 
ing the rivers, he subjugated, purified, created anew the 
earth. 

He is the strong arm, the great, patient heart, the cour- 
ageous workman, who prepared the earth for the second 
creator, the artistic Prometheus. 

Prometheus. 

^Eschylus alone, among the poets, had the good for- 
tune to be at once the singer and the hero, to have the 
deeds and the writings, the grandeur of a complete man. 
His tragedies fifty times won the crown.* He, like 
Homer, had rhapsodists who sang his verses on the roads. 
He never died ; he was always sustained in the theatres, 
which played only the pieces of the living. He remained 
in a statue of bronze in the square of Athens, as a censor, 
a pontiff, and a prophet, to watch the people, and to con- 
stantly warn them. Aristophanes, the great scoffer at the 
gods, respected only ^Eschylus. He had seen him in the 
underworld seated upon a throne of brass. 

In the noble epitaph which ^Eschylus made for himself, 
he remembered only that he fought at Marathon. He for- 
got his hundred tragedies. There never was a more vali- 
ant family than his. He was wounded at Marathon, and 
was the brother of the most glorious soldiers of Salamis. 
One of these was Ameinias, the bold pilot who first struck 
the fleet of Xerxes, and won the prize of valor at Salamis. f 
The other was the stubborn Cynaegirus, who allowed him- 
self to be cut to pieces as he held the vessel with his 

* It is said that ./Eschylus won but thirteen dramatic contests. — Ed. 
■{• Herodotus : viii., 84, 93. 



Greece, 



153 



hands, which were severed, one after the other, and then 
he still kept hold by his teeth. The sons, the nephews, the 
kinsmen of yEschylus would have done as much, if they 
had had like opportunities; they made up, however, by a 
torrent of tragedies, good or bad, composing and writing 
with the furor of the great old man. One of his sons had 
the peculiar good fortune to win the prize over Sophocles, 
over his masterpiece, the King CEdipus. 

The magistrates of Athens carefully preserved a com- 
plete copy of the works of ^Eschylus, lest some rash actor 
should change any of his sacred words. Nevertheless, in 
spite of this vigilance, only seven dramas remain to us, of 
which there is but one complete trilogy, the Orcstcia. Of 
the three parts of the Prometheus, only one survives. 
Enormous and colossal remains ! As the traveller, who, 
finding in the sands of Egypt the foot of a Sphinx, or its 
granite finger, attempts to calculate what must have been 
its prodigious size, we in like manner, viewing these re- 
mains, seek to conceive the dimensions of this colossal 
^Eschylus. 

Aristophanes admirably says that the verses of JEschy 
lus are strong " as the closely-fitted planks of a vessel," 
as the indestructible frames of those conquering ships, 
which dashed to pieces the fleet of Asia. He placed him 
above Sophocles, far, very far from the feebler Euripides. 
But his true place is between Isaiah and Michael Angelo. 

In the sombre Prometheus there is more than simple 
art; there is the true essence of grief; nothing which 
softens or consoles as in Sophocles. The tragic utterances 
of the heroes of the past seem dreadful warnings, mournful 
forebodings on the present. Above all ^Eschylus reminds 
us of Michael Angelo. The Italian prophet, in the midst 
of the splendors and of the conquests of Julius II., painted 
terror on the ceilings of the Sistine Chapel, while the pro- 
phet iEschylus appears to have been filled with grief in 
the midst of the prosperity of Athens. 

Both had seen beforehand the terrible trials, the cruel 



154 Bible of Humanity. 

blows of destiny, and at the end, the judgme?it y the high 
victory of justice. This was the greatness of ^Eschylus 
which Aristophanes could not appreciate. Against the 
despotic arbitrariness of the mythology of his time, and of 
all other mythologies, he invoked, contained, brought forth 
the principle of justice. His Prometheus proclaiming 
the overthrow of Jupiter, also foretold the death and im- 
potency of every myth of the future, not established on 
the inflexible right. His Caucasus was the rock on which 
the Stoic was soon to fix the Organon of Impartial Jus- 
tice, against the tyranny of gods in heaven, and of kings 
and priests on earth. 

The future unknown, veiled. The severity of the pro- 
phet, his grief, fills with astonishment. ^Eschylus, in his 
fortieth year, began the series of his threatening tragedies, 
in the smiling moment in which the triumphant city was 
pursuing, and crowning her victory, and appeared the 
Queen of Greece. She was brilliant, she was fruitful. In 
every sense she was radiant. She was young, and in her 
twentieth year in her two admirable geniuses, two adoles- 
cents, who just then began to give indications of their 
wonderful faculties, the beautiful Sophocles, the powerful 
Pheidias. The latter, first a painter, by the test-stroke of 
his chisel, sculptured the soul of Athens in his Minerva 
Polias, haughty, sovereign, and colossal, who, with her 
dazzling helmet, ruled at the Acropolis and in the temples, 
and overlooked the distant sea and islands. 

Moment of immense expectation ! Between Themis- 
tocles and Aristides, between the generous Cimon and 
thr sagacious Pericles, the struggle appeared equal, and 
their contests even seemed to constitute the harmony of 
liberty. 

^Eschylus saw nothing of this. His soul dwelt in the 
preceding century, in the disasters and dangers. He, like 
Herodotus, had the presentiment of the Nemesis that 
hovers over our heads, and takes revenge on our prosper- 
ity. The prodigious Babylon has indeed fallen. Massive 



Greece. 155 

Egypt, so strongly seated, is also prostrate. The good 
Croesus, the cunning Polycrates, and delightful Ionia, all 
have perished ! Athens remained the dike which arrested 
the torrent of barbarians. But how many and rapid the 
changes in Athens herself! ^Eschylus, when an infant, 
saw the Peisistratidae, and the vindication of liberty, the 
valiant act of Harmodius. Grown up, he won the great 
glory of his wound at Marathon. Greece for the moment 
found herself carried to heaven by the great wave ofSala- 
mis. She descended again, and a new age began. That 
of heroism had gone forever. That of harmony now 
began — the reign of the arts, of the beautiful. An im- 
mense radiancy of inventive genius and of fruitful intelli- 
gence, a world of grace and light was ushered in to 
astound all coming times. In a single century was pre- 
pared the work of two thousand years ! Is it thus that 
men live ? How is it that we do not foresee the coming 
days of exhaustion ? What a beautiful play will Nemesis 
have in return, when she brings hither her barbarians, not 
this time from Asia but from Macedonia, in the gloomy 
day of Cheronea ! 

Certainly the bow of steel had slackened, and the lyre, 
enriched with new strings, took not its harmony except 
from abandoning the rough and strong tone which it had 
in the time of the heroes. Sophocles tells us that Her- 
cules, civilized, abandoned the club ; that he studied and 
taught the choir of the stars, and conducted their concerts.* 
The second Minerva, less colossal, no longer extended her 
threatening look over the seas. Pheidias, this time made 
her meditative, of a deep and penetrating mind, closely 
resembling the effigies of Themistocles, " of him who 
alone saw and foresaw," says Thucydides. 

At what is she looking ? We do not know. But she is 
certainly looking at something immense, infinite, and sub- 

* In other words, the Phoenician Hercules, the sun-god, had taken the 
place of the Grecian hero. — Ed. 



156 Bible of Humanity, 

lime. More than Athens herself. It is rather the long 
career of centuries which Athens will illuminate. She con- 
templates the eternity of art. 

Who marvels that Greece, in her wonderful beauty, 
admired, adored herself? wished for immortality? Ob- 
serve that before all statuary, the living statue existed ; 
that the powerful gymnical and harmonical creation 
had made out of the real the most perfect ideal ever 
dreamed of. Art at first copied ; it began with portraits.* 
It did not amuse itself by sculpturing gods at hazard. It 
made the likeness of those it saw. Beauty appeared di- 
vine in itself, and more divine as a revelation of the soul. 
Pheidias became a sculptor by witnessing, on the Olym- 
pian course, a beautiful boy, coming off conqueror in a 
race. Another youth of sweet beauty, at fifteen years of 
age, led the chorus of thanksgiving to the gods, after 
Marathon ; he was applauded by the Athenians . . . his 
soul burst forth. ... It was Sophocles. 

All this is grand and pure, very noble, and yet lively 
and fruitful. The gods humanized, or, rather, made di- 
vine by the soul imparted to them by Pheidias, left the 
adyta of the temples, and seated themselves under the 
porticoes, and even in the public squares. So the cities 
had two classes of inhabitants side by side and living to- 
gether, men and gods. The strange idea of Winckelman 
that all was motionless, beautiful without but destitute of 
expression, is daily more and more completely contra- 
dicted.f These marbles everywhere palpitate with life. 

* In 558 B.C. the custom was introduced of erecting statues to the con- 
querors at the Olympian games. This is an important observation of M. de 
Ronchaud in his beautiful book on Pheidias, page 59. From that moment 
sculpture began to soar. 

f Compare the brilliant genius of the Renaissance. Jean Goujon, where 
he is sublime, as in a river, a nymph {Cluny Museum) has made fluid bodies, 
of a fantastic undulation, through which life runs, and which plunge us in a 
profound revery. . . . Death and life, what are you ? The longer I remain 
here absorbed in looking at this, the less I know about it. The Greek, on 
the other hand, gives a conscious, strong, and eager feeling of life ! The 



Greece. jey 

Before Euripides, and already in Sophocles, it was ap- 
parent that, far from being cold, this art was endangered 
by its tenderness. I admire Sophocles, but not without 
revolt, when he dwells too long and sadly on physical 
evils, like the wound of Philoctetes ; when he unnerves Her- 
cules, and exhibits as feeble the strongest of the strong. 
Leave to me the entire beneficent legend, for I shall soon 
need it. Consider that Zeno will soon oppose the philos- 
ophy of Hercules to the glory of Alexander the Great. 

His (Edipus of Co Ion us is also very exciting. The sub- 
ject is '* the necessity of death," the remedy of errors, and 
the recovery of life, the sweet expiation which awaits the 
victim of fatality in the long-wished-for sleep under the 
generous shelter of Athens, the profound security in the 
woods of the Eumenides. The two adorable girls carried 
away, brought back, produce the highest emotion. . . . 
See ! all the great people weep. 

I understand very well that the hero, ^Eschylus, who 
saw the beginning of that age of emotions, those affecting 
marvels, and other of refinement, of sublime analysis, was 
alarmed. What did he think when that wonderful rea- 
soner, Zeno of Elea, who first formulated logic, went to 
Athens ? With remarkable skill, Zeno, overwhelming the 
haughty sophists of Ionia, proved to the Athenians, in 
that centre of activity, that motion did not exist. Peri- 
cles and all listened. They were passionately fond of 
such tests of skill. 

The centre for thinkers was soon transferred to the resi- 
dence of a young lady, one of those Ionian women, whom 
the overthrow of Miletus sent to Athens. These Milesian 
women, all charming, exciting attention because of their 
painful shipwreck and the sale and enslavement of many, 
became the more the queens. The voluptuous Thargelia, 
the delicate and impressive Aspasia had a court, and what 

fainting women, who, from the fronton of the temple, are gazing to see if the 
child delivered to the Minotaur is coming and do not see him, are striking and 
tragical in the highest degree. 



158 Bible of Humanity. 

courtiers ! The undulatory genius of Ionia, with its fleet- 
ing grace, which made Olympus and its metamorphosis of 
old, was Aspasia herself. Pheidias, and his young school, 
at her court, got the inspiration of that exalted irony 
which mocked and arraigned the gods. Pericles, the re- 
flecting and cautious orator, learned from her the art of 
mimicry and the imposing comedy, which fascinated the 
people. The sophists studied her insidious words, the 
art of entangling, unravelling, and remixing the fine-spun 
threads of women, which even the keenest could not dis- 
cover. Protagoras learned from her to doubt everything, 
and Socrates, later, to doubt doubt. 

Strange refinement, and how rapid ! How many cen- 
turies in twenty or twenty-five years ! Yesterday, it was 
the coarseness of Marathon ; to-day, all is elegant, refined, 
subtle. Where is the robust spirit which made Greece 
victorious ? I see lodging with Pericles his teacher, an 
obscure man renowned for volatilizing the gods. This 
Anaxagoras, the Ionian, was surnamed " the NOUS," or 
spirit, because he believed there was no other god. Sub- 
lime and pure idea which, centralizing the deity,* but 
drowning the energies of the nation in aether, caused Pal- 
las and Hercules to disappear, and conducted all Athens 
straight to monarchical tranquillity. 

Unity in heaven, unity on earth, was the dream which 
brooded in secret. Many would have a monarch to 
represent Jupiter, not with the "Spirit" of Anax- 
agoras, but by their favorite Bacchus-Dionysus, a god 
wholly eastern, who wore the tiara, \ and the effeminate 
dress of the women of Asia. He had taken the thyrsus, 
and the ivy of the god of vintage, the ancient, rural 
Bacchus. He drew after him women and slaves, a 
troop of orgiasts. The Athenian slaves, who were sub- 



* Anaxagoras styled the Divine Being " Nous autokrates," — the Mind or 
Spirit that by itself rules all. — Ed. 
\ Sophocles. 



Greece, 159 

stantially free, bold, like our Frontins and our Lisettes, 
admitted to the spectacles, to the Mysteries, had their god, 
their tyrant, their Savior, in Dionysus. By his affiliation, 
he was worshipped at Eleusis. He had occupied Delphi, 
dug for himself a subterranean tomb under the temple, 
from which he was resuscitated. He compelled Apollo to 
play in his comedy. Nor was this all. He aimed to eclipse 
all the little gods of Greece and to be the leader in great 
things, as in the conquest of Asia and of India. When was 
this to occur ? and in whom was this great god to make 
his appearance ? To each tyrant the people exclaimed : 
" It is he!" 

By a strange coincidence, Gelon, the glorious ruler of 
Syracuse, on the same day in which was achieved the 
victory of Salami's, had subdued Carthage, and imposed 
on her the law that she should no longer offer human sac- 
rifices. He felt so secure that, on his return, he laid aside 
his sword, and went about without guards. He was 
chosen tyrant a second time, and hence for life. The 
tyrants were revered like gods, chiefs of liberty, the lib- 
erty of brutishness. They appropriated the name of the 
celestial ruler Dionysus, or the name which pleased the 
vain hope, Savior (Soter) ; or were called Demetrios, the 
name from Demeter. These Saviors were terrible ; they 
crushed the idiots who expected liberty from the ruler. 

Gloomy future, which at the time of yEschylus was 
scarcely distinguishable. The orgies of Bacchus had but 
recently been instituted at Sparta.* The Spartan Pausa- 
nias, the vanquisher of Platea, thought he could make him- 
the Gelon, the Bacchus Savior of Greece. The enlightened 
Athenians laughed at this. Those dark-laid schemes 
seemed impossible. The old men, however, who ob- 
served Pericles, were of opinion that they could trace in 
him the features of Pisistratus. 

But let us return to art. Under the dominion of Bac- 

* Aristotle. 



160 Bible of Humanity, 

chus, in the constant fermentation of the mind, the theatre 
became the controlling demand of Athens. It became 
radiant, and abandonded all its elementary forms. All 
gradually changed, the stage, the plays, and the actors. 

Up to this time the stage had been built in frame-work, 
and temporarily for the hours of the festivals ; it was ex- 
temporized for improvisation. The poet would not entrust 
any one with the oversight, the effort, the danger of- the 
performance. He represented himself the part of the 
hero. Tragedy required an act of courage, of devotion, 
in which all the energies of the man are staked. He rushed 
fearlessly on the trembling boards, from beneath which 
proceeded threatening echoes. With all the energies of 
his physical being, his soul, and his voice, he defied the 
caprices and the ridicule of the audience. Was the face 
masked, and thus sheltered from outrage? Not always, for 
Sophocles, because of his extreme beauty, played the 
part of the beautiful Nausicaa in one of his own pieces. 

But this was a severe trial to Sophocles, and the people, 
who were passionately fond of him, spared their favorite 
this painful task, and assigned him other and more con- 
genial characters, that of a priest, for example. They 
thought that he was " so beloved of the gods " that they 
attributed to him a miracle. One day, during a storm, a 
hymn of Sophocles was sung. In an instant it became 
calm. Neptune and the sea listened. 

He felt that he was beloved. In his twentieth year he 
competed for the tragedy. He produced a graceful pas- 
toral, Triptolemits, doubtless to the praise of Eleusis and 
of the new Mysteries. It contained this line from Pindar: 
''This is true happiness: to see them, and then die!" 
These words excited, delighted, and carried away all that 
were initiated. The admiration, the furor for the young 
poet went so far that they sacrificed to him one of the 
grand tragedies of ^Eschylus. The old partisans of 
iEschylus, heroic and patriotic, struggled in vain. There 
was a general misunderstanding. The matter was referred 



Greece. 161 

to the generals, to the glorious Cimon, who, having re- 
turned from a new victory, brought back the ashes of 
Theseus, a most acceptable gift to the Athenians. The 
son of Miltiades could not be hostile to the old soldier of 
Marathon. But the valiant Cimon could not be brave 
before the people ; he recognized their wishes and turned 
his back on ^schylus. 

^Eschylus, henceforth, had everything against him, his 
age, his long successes, and the progress of art, which 
pursues its own path, independently even of genius. The 
art required more of the tragic and less of the lyric — a 
more complicated plot, which seizes the heart, keeps it 
uneasy, in suspense. This was the peculiarity of Sophocles. 
^Eschylus did not decline it. He followed it in the Oresteia. 

This is the grandest production of the Greek theatre, or, 
rather, of any theatre. Shakespeare, with all his resources 
and varied effects, his magical and profound complications, 
has not surpassed it. So exceedingly simple, it dispenses 
with all ingeniousness, and without subtlety, without 
twisting, without trickery, it takes a stronger hold of us, 
clasps us and captivates us. 

The three pieces of Orestes advance in terrific crescendo. 
It was customary, during the festivals, to play from morn- 
ing to night. The three pieces could be represented in 
one day ; the Death of Agamemnon in the morning, that 
of Clytcmnestra at noon, and the Enmenides in the even- 
ing. One drama after another, terror after terror, the 
audience could not breathe. The firmest trembled. Wo- 
men swooned, and it is said that many miscarried. At 
night there was general consternation. /Eschylus alone, 
who had acted Orestes, was undismayed. 

Agamemnon had taken effect. A cold chill seizes us 
when his perfidious wife receives him with tenderness and 
wraps him in her veil. The Clytemnestra (Choephores) 
from the beginning causes the hair to bristle with terror ; 
the shivering of the parricide, even the anticipation of the 
remorse. Orestes realizes his destiny. The gods wished 
II 



1 62 Bible of Humanity, 

him to murder, and then sought to punish him for doing 
their will. This is the audacious plot of the Eumenides , 
making plain the inconsistency of the gods. They pur- 
sued the gods no less than Orestes, overwhelming them 
together by their mutual contradictions. 

iEschylus was very bold. He expressed the popular 
belief; but it might produce irritability, indignation, when 
it was beheld so clearly exposed. This has never been 
stated, because it has never been made apparent what 
was the moral condition of the mind, the inclination of 
the Grecian Olympus at this period of its rapid descent. 

With the overthrow of Ionia, Jupiter and Apollo fell 
into notorious disrepute. Their oracles were disregarded. 
Crcesus, who had paid them immense sums, who expected 
to conquer the Persians, and became their prisoner, out- 
raged the god of Delphi by offering him his chains. This 
god was surnamed Loxias, the ambiguous, the equivocal. 
When he was consulted before Salamis, he evaded an 
answer, and was ridiculed. The only god left was Themis- 
tocles. iEschylus evidently remembered the uncertain 
oracle, which occasioned the loss of Lydia, and poor 
Ionia, and the unfortunate Miletus so much regretted by 
Athens. In the Eumenides he boldly said : " Behold 
the temple of Delphi ! . . . How it drips with blood ! " 

Apollo outraged, Jupiter outraged (as he had done), 
was not his most dangerous act. The mortal danger in 
his production was what he made the Eumenides say, and 
contemptuously repeat over and over again : " The young 
gods." If this sentence injured Phoebus, it fell much 
more directly on Bacchus, the last-born of Olympus.* 
The terrible goddesses crushed this profaner of their 
secrets with all the sacredness of their antiquity. 

^Eschylus, who was an Eleusinian, who, according to a 
fragment, loved, as a son, the Eleusinian Ceres, knew bet- 
ter than any one else the significant changes in the Mys- 
teries, in which Iacchus, who was first introduced as 
* Herodotus. 



Greece. 163 

a child, grew up, became Zagreus dead and revived, and 
finally the triumphant Bacchus, who subdued poor Ceres, 
and became for good or bad her husband.* 

This revolution seems to have occurred between 600 and 
500 B.C.f But things rush on. To the Eleusinian Bac- 
chus, who preserved some decency, was gradually mingled 
the ignoble product of the Asiatic Bacchus. (Sabazius 
Atys, Adonis, etc.) All this before the year 400 B.C. 
The great Bacchus, who tore Orpheus to pieces, the Sav- 
ior, as he was called, of women and of slaves, god of 
liberty (of drunkenness and of frenzy), this great Bacchus 
upheld by the masses, was a tyrant in Greece. He in- 
spired terror everywhere. % 

Even at Athens, the city of incredulity and laughter, 
the very compact masses of the initiated, the women and 
the slaves were very daring, and especially at the theatres, 
where their numbers gave them boldness. Slaves were 
admitted. § They dared not speak, but they could mur- 
mur, roar, and it sounded like thunder. Women attended. 
Their regard for this tender Bacchus sometimes made them 
furious, and almost assassins. ^Eschylus came near ex- 
periencing this. For a word which he said of the Mys- 
teries in one of his pieces, he would have perished under 
their fury had he not embraced the altar which was on 
the stage. 

We can realize the extreme danger to which he exposed 
himself by that terrible and clear expression : " The young 

* Yet Clement of Alexandria says that when he was tried on Mars Hill for 
having divulged the arcane wisdom, he exculpated himself on the ground that 
he had never been initiated. His brother, Ameinias, the hero of Salamis, is 
said to have secured him from the rage of the populace. — Ed. 

f More properly between 500 and 400 B. C ^Eschylus was born at Eleusis, 
525 B.C.— Ed. 

% Herodotus, who, as we know, read his history at the Olympian games in 
452 B.C. (four years after the death of ^Eschylus), was so fearful of this 
tyranny that, whenever he met with Osiris, the Egyptian Bacchus, he declared 
that he held his peace and did not dare to speak. 

§ Gorgias. 



x64 Bible of Humanity. 

gods" But, in braving the fanatics, was he assured of the 
support of the opposite party, the strong thinkers, the so- 
phists, those who followed Anaxagoras and his disciple 
Pericles, who wanted no God but the Spirit f By no 
means. This party of religious liberty was attacked by 
iEschylus on account of their tortuous ways with respect 
to political tyranny. He made the Eumenides say : " Re- 
vere justice , honor the laws. Take care not to give your- 
selves masters" The entire piece, doubtless, was a trans- 
parent attack against the intrigues employed by Pericles. 
Some one, instructed by Pericles, had instigated the people 
to suppress the Areopagus. ^Eschylus interposed the bold 
drama, in which he exhibited Minerva instituting, for 
the trial of Orestes, that irreproachable tribunal, which 
had long made Athens the centre and the temple of law. 

The Areopagus was not abolished. The people re- 
coiled. But so much more certain was the ruin of yEschy- 
lus. They dogged his steps. Under twenty pretexts he 
was persecuted and calumniated. They whispered in the 
ear that, although in the denouement of his tragedy, he 
dared not kill his victim before the spectators, he did it 
behind the scenes ; and that thus in the frenzy of success 
he offered human sacrifices for the favor of the gods of 
heaven or hell. 

Such charges as these ingeniously prepared the way for 
the great blow, the accusation of impiety. We know but 
little of the details. Did he defend himself? We are ig- 
norant. It seems that, for his defence, he only exhibited 
his wound. The accusers remembered Marathon, his 
brother and Salamis, blushed, were silent. 

Not being able to strike him they struck the theatre, but 
the blow was aimed at ^schylus. One morning, it fell. 
The old theatre of wood that so often had shaken under 
his feet and resounded with the thunder of his voice— fell. 
Manifestly the vengeance of the gods. He had tired their 
patience. They had imposed silence on his impious fury, 
on this Ajax, on this Orestes, on this gigantic blasphemer. 



Greece, 165 

He had destroyed himself, and also his theatre. Another 
edifice was erected, beautiful, of marble, surrounded 
with statues. But it did not suit yEschylus. It did not, 
like the other, vibrate and breathe, impregnated with the 
ancient spirit. The images of the gods, marvels of art, 
divided the attention, the regard. The most prominent of 
the statues was the pensive, sleepy, and voluptuous young 
god Bacchus, a masculine Venus, the beloved of Athens. 

All this reminded the old hero of the sentence in his 
own drama, which the Furies repeated to Orestes: "It 
is all over with thee. . . . Thou shalt never more speak." 

I think that it was at this time * that, just as he was 
leaving these scenes forever, the old Titan erected his own 
Caucasus, caused himself to be bound, nailed, and thun- 
derstruck by Jupiter, in order to hurl at him the great 
word of rebellion, the prophecy of the future. 

Colonus, a little demos, or market-town, not far from 
Athens, a place of most tragical interest, is known by 
/Eschylus's tragedy of Gldipus, his death, the mystery of 
his grave. It had near by the woods of the Eumeni- 
des and the altar of an outcast, the Titan Prometheus. 
While the Sacred Highway to Eleusis was day and night 
peopled, noisy, Colonus was deserted. Its old, ill-famed 
divinities did not attract the people. Its forbidding wood- 
land affrighted. The passer-by avoided it and turned his 
eyes away. 

Prometheus, as is known, was the personal adversary of 
Zeus, who denounced him, caused him to be nailed up on 
Caucasus. In spite of the gods he had given us fire, and 
with it the Arts. The Greeks dared not forget him, and 
half-worshipped him. The economical honor of a little 
race was paid annually to this benefactor. But few pat- 
ronized it. Aristophanes complained of it. While people 
crowded one another in the equivocal Mysteries, " no one 
knew how to bear the torch of Prometheus." This torch, 

* This is the very reasonable opinion of Ottfried Miiller. 



1 66 Bible of Humanity. 

kindled at an altar at Athens, had to be carried to the al- 
tar of Colonus. The rapid, sparkling or smoking fire with 
which the wind sported, sad image of our destinies, passed 
from hand to hand, but scarcely reached there. The 
gloomy altar remained obscure. 

Strange forgetfulness ! Culpable ingratitude ! Prome- 
theus was the primitive emancipator, and all free energy 
proceeded from him. Through him, and not Vulcan or 
Hephaistos, who was not yet born,* has sprung forth Wis- 
dom, the elder daughter of Jupiter. The god of the thun- 
derbolt, among his black clouds, was oppressed by her, felt 
her brooding under his brow. The industrious Titan, 
with a blow (the most beautiful and sublime that was ever 
struck,) pierced his temple. A luminous ether shone, 
serene, pure, virginal, the eternal virgin who was the in- 
spired soul of Athens, still alive, and who will live and 
survive all the Jupiters. 

This is certainly the most exalted legend of antiquity. 
Noble product of genius and of grief! It is the immutable 
lesson of man, that of emancipation through effort, the 
only efficacious justice. It teaches each one to draw out 
of himself his Pallas, his energy, his Art, his true Savior. 
It is directly opposed to the gloomy Saviors of the differ- 
ent faiths, the false liberators. It alone is the Liberator. 

This ether of Pallas seems to be the same fire with which 
Prometheus kindled the human soul. The Titan took it 
from Heaven to place it in us. Till that had been done, 
man was as heavy clay, and dragged himself about, herd- 
ing with his kind, scoffed by the gods. Prometheus put 
in him the spark. This was the crime imputed to the 
great Titan. "And, behold, he begins to gaze at the 



* Prometheus was doubtless an older deity than Zeus, being Pelasgian or 
Ethiopian, and not Aryan or Ionian. The scholiast to Sophocles declares 
him t.» be "first and older, holding the sceptre, and Hephaistos or Vulcan 
new tad second." Most likely he pertained to the worship which the Olym- 
pian goda superseded. Jacob Bryant declares him to have been a god of 
, which would render this account very plausible.— Ed. 



Greece. 167 

stars, to mark the seasons, to divide time. He combines 
letters and fixes memory. He finds the high science, the 
numbers. He digs the earth and surveys it, makes cars, 
vessels. He understands, he foresees, he pierces the 
future." Prometheus opened to man the road to enfran- 
chisement. He was the anti-tyrant at the time when 
Olympus, in its young Jupiter-Bacchus, was more and 
more the tyrant , a type too well repeated by the tyrants 
of earth. 

I am much mistaken if the Titan ^Eschylus did not 
frequently come to ask, as CEdipus, a seat of the Eume- 
nides of Colonus, if he did not sit down at this deserted 
altar of the great forgotten benefactor. At this altar, 
and not elsewhere, could the poet learn two things which 
the Titan alone could reveal. yEschylus knew the name 
of Prometheus's mother, knew that he was not the son of 
a certain Clymene, as it was absurdly said, but the son of 
Justice, of the archaic Themis, who had witnessed the 
birth of all the gods. The second thing, altogether divine, 
which neither Hesiod nor any one else had suspected, was 
the true motive for which Prometheus sacrificed himself. 
In Hesiod, the benefit conferred by the Titan was a trick 
of malice : he wished to play a trick on Jupiter. In JEs- 
chylus, he had compassion on the miseries of man. He 
had compassion. This constituted him divine, this made 
him a god above the gods. 

Compassion ! Justice ! Two most powerful levers which 
gave an incredible force to the old fable. Thirty-thousand 
spectators were captivated, bound more tenaciously than 
Prometheus on Caucasus, when he uttered the cry, "O 
Justice ! O my mother ! Thou seest what they make me 
suffer ! " 

What heart was not pierced when with a profound voice 
he repeated this bitter sentence, " I had compassion ! 
This is why no one has had compassion on me ! " 

If, as it is believed, the tragedy of Prometheus appeared 
about the year 460 B.C., ^Eschylus was then sixty-five years 



1 68 Bible of Humanity. 

old. I believe, however, that in spite of his age, ^Eschylus 
really appeared at this time on the stage. No one would 
have dared to perform those very dangerous pieces but the 
author. Aristophanes found no one but himself to per- 
form the piece in which he stigmatized Cleon. iEschylus, 
after the Eumenides, in which he braved at once both the 
party of Pericles and that of the young gods, could scarcely 
find an intrepid actor to play the Titan, the impious, the 
solemn enemy of Tyrants, of Tyranny. It is this word 
evidently which opens and explains the drama. (Tvpavnc.) 

Notwithstanding this, it is said that the Prometheus is 
obscure. It is too clear. On one side there was bound 
and nailed the Son of Law. On the other hand, quite 
powerful in heaven, there was the Tyrant, the enemy of 
Law, the Lord, the arbitrary one, the favor or Grace. This 
one was called Zeus, or Jupiter. But Jupiter, at that time, 
was mingled with Bacchus, and soon after lent to him 
the thunderbolt and the eagle.* 

There was the especial danger. ^Eschylus alone could 
act, acted, gave his arms to the chains, his hands to the 
nails, and his head to the hammer. Extraordinary spec- 
tacle, which had all the effect of a personal execution ! 

Not a word in the first scene, while the cruel slaves of 
Jupiter— Force and Strength— compel Vulcan to rivet 
him fast. These left him only this decided and audacious 
order, " Respect the tyrant." He opened not his mouth. 
But when left alone, his heart burst, and from the mask of 
brass escaped a terrible sigh. 

iEschylus, in the Seven, and in the Persians, appears 
sometimes exaggerated and emphatic, but not at all in 
Prometheus. It is nature, it is grief, true explosions of 
grief, a feeling at once both general and personal. There 
is no distinguishing. It is the Titan, and it is ^schylus. 
It is man as he was and as he will be. Does humanity 
complain,— humble itself? No. From the depths of 



* In the statues of Polykleitus. 



Greece. 169 

grief it raises itself in its strength. We feel that heroism 

in man is nature. 

To the nymphs of the ocean, who came to weep with 
him, he explained his destiny, but with a greatness and 
haughtiness which made them shudder. He spoke in the 
same way to his feeble friend, the Ocean, who wished to 
give him cowardly advice. He indicated forever the 
great trails of the Tyrant : " He wJks rules by HIS own 
laws" (IciuU) peculiar, individual, personal, — savage 
and not civil unequal caprices, love for one, death for 
another. And he adds this strong sentence: M He has 
in himself* 1 and he i> its proprietor. 

Hut the deepest trait <>f the caprice which best marks 
the Tyrant is the , the cruel debauche x the barbar- 

ity in love itself. What /Eschylus himself, when a boy, 
saw under the Peisistratidx, and which occasioned their 
fall, he portrayed in Jupiter. The unfortunate Io, de- 
ceived by Jupiter, delivered to the fury of Juno, stung by 
the atrocious hornet, goes distracted over the seas, the 
precipices, from one region to another. As she ran 
along, she accidentally drew near for a moment to the 
fatal rock of Caucasus. The two wretched personages, 
Io and Prometheus, the eternal motion and captivity, the 
eternal immobility, looked for a moment upon each other. 

The hapless Io wished to know her destiny. She asked 
the enigma of the world, " Who rules destiny ? " — " The 
Parcai, the I 

Cruel sentence, which however is but a cry of grief 
over the disorder of this world. This fatalistic form # re- 
curs very often in .Eschylus, like bitter complaints, roar- 
It is a weapon rather than a dogma. He employed 
Destiny, as a yoke of brass to make the Gods bend, to 

* Quinet and Louis Menard have well said that the Greek Fatalism had 
been infinitely exaggerated. It is absurd to think that the people who, of 
all other, made the strongest use of liberty, did not believe in it. The fatal- 
ism of the Mussulmans, the fatalism of Christianity, made the middle ages 
sterile. If Greece was so fruitful, it is because she believed in liberty. 



! j Bible of Humanity. 

break the caprice of the Homeric Olympus. But look at 
the bottom, the true thought and the soul. Living lib- 
erty is everywhere seen in his dramas. It circulates in 
them, and enlivens them with an extraordinary breath. 
In the Seven, and in the Persians, it breathes and is the 
country, the free genius of Greece. In the Eumenides it 
is the right, the judicial debate of Law and Nature. Pro- 
metheus Bound is, in the highest degree, the freeman — 
the liberty, all the more strong that it is the daughter of 
Justice. It is not Titanic fury, a vain escalade on heaven, 
but just liberty against the unjust heaven of Arbitrariness 
(or of Grace). 

Prometheus is the true prophet of the Stoic, and of the 
Jurisconsult. He is the anti-pagan, the anti-Christian. 
He leans on law, he invokes nothing but his works. He 
proclaims only Justice, no privilege of race, no predesti- 
nation, nothing of the archaic primogeniture of Titans 
over gods. The deliverance for which he waits will come 
to him sooner or later from the hero of Justice, Hercules, 
who will set him free and will kill the vulture which gnaws 
him. Jupiter then will yield to the Right, will submit to 
the return, the triumph of Prometheus. 

But all must be expiated. He will not escape alto- 
gether. A terrible successor will come, a dreadful giant, 
armed with an avenging fire, to destroy that of Olympus 
and his little thunderbolt. Jupiter, bound in his turn, 
will become the sufferer. At the moment in which we 
think that Prometheus is on the point of telling the name 
of this conqueror of Jupiter, comes Mercury and interro- 
gates him, but draws from him nothing but scorn. The 
thunder mutters. ... In vain. Prometheus, with firm 
foot, waits, defies. . . . The thunderbolt falls. We remain 
in ignorance of this deep mystery. 

The land of Athens, after the play of Prometheus, could 
no longer endure ^schylus. He voluntarily exiled him- 
self. The people breathed easier. 

A prophet is the honor and the scandal of the world. 



Greece. 



171 



Isaiah was sawn asunder. The unlucky Cassandra, in 
whom /Eschylus appears to have painted himself, victim 
both of the people and of the gods, goes through outrages 
to find the deadly knife, under the fatal laurel. People 
are implacable toward those who force them to see. They 
bear a grudge to them for having spoken, and yet would 
compel them to speak more. If they do not explain 
themselves, they arc impostors. " Die, or explain ! Thou 
breakest the public peace. Thou art the enemy of the 
commonwealth ! " This is the inward torture of the pro- 
phetic spirit. From those frightful peaks to which his 
flight had borne him, he sees the immensity, the terra in- 
cognita. But how can it be described ? This troubled 
vision, which can neither be illumined nor removed, over- 
whelms the seer. /Eschylus, who had taken refuge in 
Sicily, survived a short time. Death came to him from 
heaven : " an eagle, holding a tortoise, looking for a rock 
on which to break it, took for a rock the head of /Eschy- 
lus, his great bald forehead." The eagle was not de- 
ceived. 

After /Eschylus there came no prophet. In his hundred 
tragedies, in which he is so antique, and by far the elder 
of Homer, he had made, if we may say it, the Greek 
Bible, the Old Testament. All the Hellenic world, even 
in its remotest colonies, as long as it endured, played 
^Eschylus at the festivals, as a religious duty. 

To him alone was given to see, beyond the great age of 
the Arts and the Sophists, the road of brass from Pericles 
to the thirty tyrants. He speaks of it in the Eumenides. 
" Beware ! make thyself no master." In the Prometheus, 
exalting himself, embracing heaven and earth, he indi- 
cated the tyrannical ways of the (( young gods " the orgies 
of the god- tyrants, who, by apotheoses or by incarna- 
tion, gave us the tyrant-gods. 

Athens was shocked, and averted her eyes. She fell 
back on Sophocles. The beautiful and sweet geniuses of 
harmony, who delighted this century, took pains not to 



! j 2 Bible of Human ity. 

imitate the troublesome, the unrelenting ^Eschylus. 
Sophocles and Pheidias, far from denouncing the frailty of 
the gods, and their sad discordance, accorded to them in 
the marble and in the drama, if not a powerful life, at 
least the Elysian dignity of great spirits. Sophocles 
treats them with gentleness and respect, and vindicates 
them. By a happy turn, the disorder of the world was 
evaded, veiled. The dreadful Sphinx which ^Eschylus 
dared to exhibit, be assured, will be seen no longer. 
Sophocles, and his offspring Plato, who will soon appear, 
turn away their eyes from it. Does this monster still 
exist ? Who could see it ? A sacred forest of laurels, 
surrounding it, has become dense with underbrush, trees, 
leaves, and flowers ! 

The fencing of the Sophists, their amusing encounters, 
vie with the theatre. Under the porch, and in the gym- 
nasia, the people encircled them. This people, laughing 
and inquisitive, values the Socratic irony more than any 
of the games of the athlete. They are proud, refined, 
subtile. Who would dare to entertain them with coarse 
novelties, which come from Thrace or Phrygia ; with those 
little Mysteries, which the women play among themselves 
m the evening ; with the orgies of weeping, in which, for 
the pleasure of lamenting, they mourn for the murder of 
Za- reus, who never existed, for the death of Adonis, lying 
on a bed of lettuce, or the wound of Atys, who is neither 
man nor woman ? People scarcely deign to speak of it. 
So much the more easily did the obscure outflow of the 
follies of Asia gain stealthily, and infiltrate itself. 

It is asked how Asia acts so slightly on Greece through 
her purest genius, Persia, while she acts so strongly 
through the lowest, the mad blindness of Phrygia, through 
the charlatans of Cybele, through the gloomy and unclean 
genius of Syria. Had she become so fallen, so enfeebled ? 
Had she in her decline deserved such disgrace? This 
has been said, but wrongfully. Greece had no decay 
whatever. She died young, like Achilles. Her strength 



Greece. 



173 



and her fruitfulness were the same. Plato and Sophocles 
had passed away. But the genius of Science opened to 
her a new career, not less great, and more firm. Hippo- 
crates, and Aristotle, those two remarkable observers, 
began a Greece of adult and manly genius, armed with a 
better method, with superior light, and more certain pro- 
cesses, which was going to stride over two thousand 
years, and approach the age of Galileo and Newton. 

The internal wars of Greece could not have destroyed 
her. She would have found in herself powerful renewals. 
The strife of faction could not have destroyed her. The 
incentive of competition, which stimulated effort, carried 
energy to the highest degree, and was a part of her life. 

Slavery, whatever may be said about it, did not destroy 
her The Greek was not weakened by it ; he reserved to 
himself the works of strength. There never was a people 
more generous toward slaves. These frequented the 
theatres, and were even admitted to the Mysteries. Their 
condition was tolerable. Diogenes, the slave, would not 
be enfranchised. An Athenian proverb tells how change- 
able was the condition of the slave : " The slave of to-day 
will be a denizen to-morrow, and soon after a citizen." 

Were the altered, corrupted customs of Greece her 
ruin ? Not at all. The unclean Venus-Astarte of Phoe- 
nicia, who flourished at Cyprus, at Cythera, at Corinth, 
had really very little place in Grecian life. The most or- 
dinary sense, the most elementary physiology, show that 
he who incessantly expends an enornlous amount of 
strength in all kinds of activity, has but little reserved 
for vices. If I were assured that an artist worked 
twenty hours daily, I should be fully persuaded as to his 
morals. 

The Greeks were talkers and laughers— often cynical. 
Far from concealing anything, they have exhibited too 
plainly miseries and shames which had rarely existed. 
The Grecian morals, of which so much has been said, at 
which the Greeks themselves jested, are to be seen in a 



174 Bible of Humanity, 

single district of Christendom which we could name, more 
than they ever were in the entire Grecian world. 

The little that was really bad among them came very 
late. In the first rapture of Art, when Pheidias proved 
" that the human form was divine," the sublimity of the 
discovery raised the soul to a great height. It must be 
acknowledged that the extreme beauty of perfect harmony 
astonishes and stupefies more than it inspires love. Gym- 
nastic life is chaste and sober. It is not at all probable 
that it made false women like those of Asia ; on the con- 
trary, it made hardened sinews and stony muscles, impos- 
ing and powerful males. 

Woman was honored in Greece. She always had her 
part in the priesthood, and was not excluded from it as in 
Judea, and among many other peoples. Haughty, exacting 
citizen, much more than man, in all the solemn honors, 
she dominated over the house, frequently influenced in 
the State. The comic writers, and the incident of Lesbos 
in Thucydides, demonstrate this. She had her distinctive 
Mysteries,* her bonds of union very strong, which consti- 
tuted a feminine republic. The jests of Aristophanes are 
most serious. The public evil was that women did not 
follow men, but remained stubbornly apart from them. 
Will Greece, in her Olympian course, in her burning char- 
iot, over the wheels on fire, degrade this weak companion ? 
A life so strained ! Beyond all moderation, so many 
works and combats ! Woman is dazzled, frightened, and 
no longer sees man. What is this ? A fire from heaven ? 
. . . She fears the destiny of Semele. 

To this too brilliant light we must add the strange hi- 
larity which comes from all excess of strength. It is the 
ardor, the youth, the triumphal pride of life. Woman 
is wounded by it and humiliated. Her eyes are down- 
cast. She takes refuge in night. She ought not to have 
been left there. Easily she makes discreditable friends. 



* The Thesmophoria. 



rcecc. 



175 



Surely, this sister of Alkestes and of Antigone, with such 
a heart, admirably adapted to the devoutness of Nature, 
deserved that her noble spirit should be opened to the 
high life of Law. She would have returned much. 
Greece herself, with all her genius, had not been able to 
conjecture that which the tender, assiduous culture of the 
spouse, the fathoming of love, would have added to her 
of heroic delicacy. 

Woman was driven towards the mournful gods of the 
East, — Bacchus, Atys, Adonis. In the spring festivals, 
thoughtless youths, in scoffing orgies, sang of the forsaken 
beauty, whose void widowhood Bacchus alone could fill. 

Can it be said that she had taken no step toward the 
higher life ? Oh, no ! The immortal memory of her who 
was calumniated, but who was a heroine as well as a sub- 
lime poet, still existed. Alcaeus reminds us of her in this 
beautiful and touching line : " Dark hair ! sweet smile ! 
innocent Sappho ! " Innocent ! * This poet, proud and 
strong, penetrating, uttered in this a beautiful truth : 
Genius is innocence ! Profound mystery of great artists. 
They preserve their purity whatever occurs. Sappho 
was born pure and very gentle. Plato places her among 
the seven sages. We see her astonished and afflicted at 
the news that her brother had purchased in Egypt a very 
celebrated courtesan. She was indignant at tyranny ; 
she hazarded her life to overthrow the tyrant of Lesbos. 
She lost her country, but found her genius in exile. 

She changed all music. She invented the song of tears 
(mixolydien). The lyre, under the hand, was insensible ; 

* She was born at Lesbos in 612 B.C., conspired against Ptolemy at the 
age of sixteen, and retired to Sicily. She was a rich, married lady, and 
mother of a son. Her native country atoned for her exile by stamping her 
image on the money as that of the genius of the town. Sicily erected a statue 
to her. She was called the tenth muse. Her memory was worshipped. A 
century or two after a songstress of Lesbos (either from love or enthusiasm) 
took the name of Sappho. It was she who made the leap at Leucadia. (See 
Visconti, etc.) Toward a.d. 1822 medals have enabled us to distinguish 
between the two Sapphos. 



176 Bible of 'Humanity. 

she made the bow, which causes it to sigh and groan. At 
last (this is the great stroke) the uniform cadences which 
had been in use, appeared emotionless to her passion. 
She found the rhythm which darts the thought, and which 
is named Sapphic. In a recitative of three verses, the 
bow is straightened. ... A short line relaxes it. . . . The 
arrow is at the heart. 

Nothing is more rare than to find rhythm. Homer and 
Shakespeare had none. Of this ardent, good, tender, 
astonishingly fruitful Sappho, who had inundated Greece 
with flame and light, there remain but a few golden 
words, simple sentences, which move our passion. Who 
can say that with all this, she, the unfortunate, had not 
found love ? That she had loved in vain ? That the 
world had fled from her ? That she had no consolation 
but the tenderness of her affectionate female pupils, who 
wiped away her tears, and whose tender-hearted friend- 
ship has been aspersed? 

The tears and despair of Sappho constitute the accusa- 
tion of Greece. The Greek genius, it must be confessed, 
passed between two worlds, it lived in the midst of things, 
neglecting the two extremes, the poles, the great perspec- 
tive, which opened on one side or on the other. It 
fathomed neither love nor death. 

These are two schools and two great paths, through 
which the soul studies herself, penetrates herself, in her- 
self and in the All ; and in this loving Soul, that, through 
these two harmonious forms — Death, Love — makes her 
eternal beauty. 

At the entrance of these two paths Greece turned aside, 
went on, smiled. Her Love was but a child, a new- 
fledged bird. Death, if not heroic, does not attract atten- 
tion. Death is adorned, nimble, and crowned as at a ban- 
quet. The beautiful Proserpina descended below, but did 
not part with her flowers. 

It is a regret to us. Greece, manly and pure, very 
lucid, had alone the right and power to lead us, as 



Greece. 



177 



another Theseus, to the double labyrinth, in which one is 
so easily lost. The effeminate, mutilated, enervated gods 
of Asia have conducted us thither through equivocal 
paths, greatly to our injury. 

An entirely new, disagreeable host entered this world, 
the weeping Death, enervating and disheartening, exactly 
contrary to the harmonious Death, which greets, adopts 
the divine order, and is illuminated by it, as in the 
Thoughts of Marcus-Aurelius. This weeping, feminine 
spectre came to us, and in the midst of strong labors and 
manly resolutions, the heroic soaring, sighs near us, and 
says : "To what purpose ? " 

Listen to this equivocal, vague, and effeminate preacher, 
swimming in the wave of reveries, mingling with grief, I 
know not what, that is loved : is it the sweet and holy 
tears of sorrow ? of pleasure ? We do not know. 

Virgin of Athens ! Proud Pallas, so pure ! What must 
have been thy prophetic scorn when people dared to offer 
thee the feverish instrument, the stormy and mournful 
flute of the worship of Asia ? . . . Thou didst throw it 
into the fountain. 

Hercules treated it in like manner. The day in which 
he heard the pathetic festival of Adonis, the enervated, 
the woman-god, he was indignant, and cursed the coming 
shame. But the supreme condemnation of these two 
texed-gods is Prometheus, father of Fire. He taught 
us another process, which was unknown in Asia. How 
through the iron and the steel, the effort, Art brings forth 
this immortal daughter, Reason, Wisdom — the ether of 
clear thought, the only inventive and fruitful thought — 
exactly contrary to the dreamy torpor of the marvellous 
Orient. 

But the East proceeds, invincible, fatal to the gods of 
light, through the charm of revery, through the magic of 
chiaro-oscuro, the clare-obscure. No more serenity. The 
human soul, this curious Eve, digging in the unknown, is 
going to rejoice and lament. It will doubtless find strange 
12 



178 Bible of Humanity. 

depths. The strength and the calm ? Never. It will 
have joy — violent, often mad, tart and gloomy. It will 
have tears ; yes, many tears, the contrast between these 
two things, their struggle and impotency, and the melan- 
choly which follows. 



Part Sttotib. 



CHILDREN OF THE TWILIGHT, OF THE NIGHT, 

AND OF THE LIGHT REFLECTING 

AGAINST THE DARKNESS. 



:o:- 



CHAPTER I. 

EGYPT— DEATH. 

EGYPT is certainly the greatest monument of death on 
this globe. No people on earth has made such persever- 
ing effort to preserve the memory of those who are no 
more, to continue to them an immortal life of honor, of 
remembrance, of worship. The whole length of the val- 
ley of the Nile is a great mortuary book, indefinitely un- 
rolled like an ancient manuscript. Not a stone on which 
there is not a writing, adorned with figures, with symbols, 
and enigmatical characters. Tombs on the right, on the 
left ; temples which appear to be sepulchres. Nothing 
more imposing to us than this long funeral path. 

Very different is the impression on the African. The 
Nile is the joy of Africa, her festival and her smile. This 
great river of life which, from unknown mountains, brings 
its tribute so faithfully every year, is the idol, the fetish 
of the world of blacks. As soon as they see it in the dis- 
tance they laugh, they sing, they adore. In this thirsty 
land the constant concern is water. From the great sand 
desert of Libya, or from the frightful chains of granite 
which lie on the Dead Sea and toward the desert of Sinai, 
for what is the vow, the prayer, and the sigh ? A drop 



180 Bible of Humanity, 

of water. A trifling oozing under a palm-tree is called 
emphatically an oasis ; people flock to it and bless it. 
What must have been the love for the great oasis, Egpyt ? 
Thou didst ask water. Behold a sea, an immense sheet 
of water, in which the land disappears, soaked, flooded, 
and dissolved. Toward the north it is but ooze. It is 
precisely this ooze, this Delta saturated with water, which 
is the paradise of Africa. All desired to live there. All 
wished the joy of it at least after death. Their bodies 
were conveyed thither in boats. The tombs were piled 
on top of one another. This low Egypt, luxuriant in pro- 
ductions, is the triumph of life, like an orgy of nature. 

Behold, then, two aspects, decidedly different, of this 
region. Our Europe admires it for its mortuary aspect ; 
Africa and the South for its river, for its possessions of 
water and food. We would willingly think of it as an 
immense female Sphinx of the length of the Nile, a colos- 
sal nurse in grief, exhibiting a beautiful face, noble and 
gloomy, to the world of whites, while, before its breast, 
and around it, the blacks kneel. 

This is the first glance. The impression at the second 
is no less great. Nowhere, in the solemn accord of 
heaven and earth, is the drama more striking. The Nile, 
pontifically, on a fixed day, descends and rolls, expands, 
refreshes, and fertilizes. It scarcely subsides, before man, 
equally regular, without losing time, measures, re-estab- 
lishes everything, ploughs and sows, and so accomplishes 
the agricultural round of the year ; while, from above, the 
sun, almighty benefactor, no less punctually vivifies, 
quickens, and blesses. 

Life of immense labor ! But still more immense was 
the conservative force, the effort against death, the admir- 
able perseverance to preserve, in spite of it, all that was 
possible of life. The family is exhibited there in its most 
affecting aspects. Unique example ! An entire people, 
during many thousands of years, has absolutely had noth- 
ing else in view than to assure one another of the second 



Egypt — Death . 1 8 1 

life of the sepulchre. We cannot think, without emotion, 
of the privation with which the most poor purchased it. 
Each tomb is for two — the husband and wife. This was 
their common aim. The man by excessive work, and 
the woman by the most extreme economy, gained and 
hoarded the little sum necessary to purchase what was 
needed in order to be embalmed together, to sleep to- 
gether under the stone, and so be resuscitated again. 

The contrast is very beautiful. Egypt is admirable for 
death and for life ; both of which contribute equally to 
this greatness. It is a region by nature harmonious, and, 
quite artlessly, a system. There is nothing elsewhere to 
be compared to it. The great Carthage, for example, her 
monstrous empire, scattered here and there in fragments, 
is entirely different. This is also the case with Syria. She 
has two faces, like Egypt, but they are by no means in 
harmony. 

Egypt, on the contrary, in her institutions, and in her 
diverse characteristics of art as well as of nature, was a 
unit, perfectly blended, both by the natural gentleness of 
her profound, peaceful spirit, and by time — the enormous 
duration. She participated in the majesty of the tomb. 
All came to honor her as the great mistress of death. 
All — even Greece, came to her school, and interrogated 
the Egyptian priests. Their enigmas and their symbolism, 
their purifications, their great festivals, their continual 
judgments on the dead, the constant lamentations of 
female weepers, and of male weepers likewise — for man 
also wept at funerals — all this was imposing, affecting. In 
spite of himself the observer imitated— not all, but this or 
that particular ; and often awkwardly. Phoenicia, opposed 
by nature, Judea, opposed by profound hatred, notwith- 
standing, appropriated some parts, as did also the Chris- 
tians. Though the Christians denounced Egypt, they fol- 
lowed her, and still follow her. In their ideas, their rites, 
their festivals, their calendar, their funeral dogmas, their 
great dogma of the death of God, they follow with so 



182 Bible of Humanity. 

many other people, behind her sepulchral boat, and in its 
eternal track. 

Champollion has well said : " Egypt is altogether 
African, and not Asiatic." 

The official monuments, in their monotonous solemnity, 
do not, any more than the priestly Pantheon in its dreary 
doctrines, speak clearly on this point. But the popular 
religion points it out distinctly. It is altogether African, 
without mystery, in broad daylight, all love, sensitive good- 
ness — voluptuous goodness. What can we do with it ? It is 
Nature, the mother of us all, venerable as well as impressive. 
Whatever she does, we must love and respect her ! 

The poor people — in their laborious life, in this mono- 
tonous climate, with a culture always the same, a weighty 
enigma of dogma, of incomprehensible writing — would 
have failed a hundred times without the good genius of 
Africa, her Isis, the divine female, tender mother and 
faithful spouse. In her they lived. 

If goodness exists anywhere on earth, it is in those 
races. Their types, remote from the dull people of the 
negro countries, and no less differing from the dry Ara- 
bian or Jew, have an extreme mildness. The family is 
very affectionate, and the welcome is good and sympa- 
thetic even toward the stranger. Egypt knew little of 
human sacrifices. It is true that annually a girl was 
thrown into the Nile, but it was a girl of wicker. No 
Harems and no Eunuchs. Neither eccentric love nor 
mutilation of infants, as in ^Ethiopia, in Syria, and every- 
where. Monogamy was general and voluntary. A man 
could have many wives. The spouse had great ascen- 
dency, and maintained it. On the upper Nile she had the 
peculiar felicity of never looking aged. She preserved the 
beautiful forms which are seen on the monuments, the 
very full bosom, erect, firm, elastic * It indicates, as in 

* Caillaud, II., 224. This author speaks also of the charming piety of one 
of the female ^Ethiopians, who, seeing our travellers completely exhausted, 
asked them how long it was since they left the Nile. "Four months ago."— 



Egypt— Death. 183 

the sacred paintings, eternal virginity, and continually 
holds erect the vase of immortal youth. 

The Kings of Asia, who often had, like the Xerxes of 
Herodotus, a profound sense of nature, preferred the 
Egyptian to all other women, asked her from the Pha- 
raohs. They loved her better than the servile Asiatic, or 
than that haughty half-male, who was called woman in 
Europe. They believed her to be ardent, capable and 
yet teachable, especially rich in goodness ; in a word, that 
she would return the most love and obedience. 

Woman ruled in Egypt. She could mount the throne, 
and was a queen in every house. She transacted every 
kind of business. Man acknowledged her genius, did not 
forsake his work, and tilled or wove.* Diodorus goes so 
far as to say that the husband swore to obey his wife. 
Without her skilful government, neither could have 
reached that difficult aim of the poor, the common em- 
balmment, the union of eternal rest. 

Egypt was delighted with her Isis, and saw nothing but 
her. Not only did Egypt adore her as a woman, as enjoy- 
ment, as happiness, and as goodness ; but all that was 
good was Isis. The wished-for water ; the river, the good 
liquid female (Nile is feminine), was not distinguishable 
from Isis. The fruitful Earth, which brings water, even all 
Egypt was Isis. The good, motherly cow was so much 
loved by the goddess that she took its horns for her orna- 
ments. The horns or the moon-like crescent ? Isis was 
the white moon, which comes so agreeably in the evening 
after the intense heat of the day, which imparts rest to the 
laborer and his beloved wife ; the moon, sweet compan- 
ion which regulates duties, which measures the work to 
man, the love to woman, and marks its return, its epoch 
and its sacred crisis. 

" Four months ! " said she, fixing on us her beautiful black eyes, full of mild- 
ness, and, stretching her arms toward us, again said : " Oh, my friends ! Oh, 
my unhappy brothers ! " She gave all she had, dates, water. — Ibid, p. 242. 
* Herodotus. 



184 Bible of Humanity, 

This Queen of the heart, the good genius of Africa, 
without mystery, was enthroned as woman, simply 
adorned with her beautiful breasts, and all the attributes 
of motherhood. She carried the lotus in her sceptre, the 
pistil of the flower of love. She bears royalty on her 
head, in the form of a diadem, the greedy bird, the Vul- 
ture, which never says " Enough." The Vulture, em- 
blem of Death, austere procuress, which imposes love, the 
maternal renewal. 

The badge of the Cow-Mother, which, strange head- 
dress, is erected above the Vulture, indicates all that love 
wishes : to renew life incessantly \ Beneficent fruitful- 
ness, infinite, maternal goodness, constitute the innocence 
of the passionate ardors of Africa. Soon love and grief, 
the eternity of regret, will more than sanctify them. 

In the Universal Mother (Isis-Athor, or Night) were 
conceived, before time, a daughter and a son, Isis-Osiris, 
who, being two, were yet but one. They had loved each 
other so much in the maternal womb, that Isis became 
pregnant, and before her birth she was a mother. She 
had a son named Horus, who is but the father formed 
again, another Osiris of goodness, of beauty, of light. 
Three therefore were born, mother, father, son, of the 
same age, of the same heart. 

What a joy! Behold them at the altar. The woman, 
the man, and the child. Bear in mind that these are per- 
sons, living beings. Not the fantastic trinity which India 
makes out of the discordant marriage of three archaic 
religions. Not the scholastic trinity which Byzantium 
has subtly woven into her metaphysics. In Egypt, it is 
life, nothing more. From the burning jet of nature 
comes forth the triple human unity. 

No other myth had such strength of reality and truth. 
The mother was not a virgin (as that of Buddha, of 
Genghis, and so many others) ; she was indeed a woman, a 
true woman, full of love, and her breast full of milk. 
Osiris is a true husband, whom no one can scoff at ; real 



Egypt — Dca tJi. 185 

and active, of assiduous generation, so enamored of his Isis 
that his superabundant love fecundated all nature. The 
son was a true son, so like to his father that he was a 
solemn testimony to the union of the parents. He was 
the living glory of love and marriage. 

As all was strong and true, beyond the false and the 
doubtful, so the result was also strong and positive. The 
human Osiris religiously conformed to the One above, 
fecundating his Isis, Egypt — fertilizing woman and earth, 
generating incessantly from his work fruits and the arts. 

These gods had not the impersonality, the obscurity, 
and the terror of certain religions of Asia. They were 
venerable and affecting, and they did not affright. If the 
Hindu stan ic Siva were not careful to close his eyes, he 
would unconsciously burn all with his devouring glance. 

In Egypt human nature itself was at the altar, in the 
mild aspect of the family, blessing creation with a mater- 
nal eye. The great God was a mother. I am greatly re- 
assured! I feared that the world of the blacks, too greatly 
dominated by the bestial life, had been struck in their 
birth by the terrifying images of the lion and the croco- 
dile, and would never make but monsters. But behold 
them tender-hearted, humanized. The amorous Africa, 
from her profound desire, has given birth to the most at- 
tractive object of the religions of earth. . . . What? The 
living reality, a good and fruitful woman. 

Joy bursts forth, immense and popular, and altogether 
natural ; a joy peculiar to thirsty Africa. It was water, a 
deluge of water, a prodigious sea of sweet water, which 
came from I know not whence, but which overspread the 
land, drowned it in happiness, infiltrating itself, insinuat- 
ing itself into the least veins, so that not a particle of sand 
had cause to complain of thirst. The small, dry canals 
smiled in proportion as the murmuring water visited and 
refreshed them. The plant laughed heartily when this 
salutary water moistened the beard of its roots, besieged 
the stalk, ascended to the leaf, inclined the stem which 



1 86 Bible of Humanity. 

was softened, and moaned sweetly. Charming spectacle, 
immense chain of love and of pure voluptuousness ! All 
this was the great Isis, flooded by her beloved. 

But nothing endures. How can we deny this? All 
perishes. The Nile, the father of life, dries up, becomes 
parched. The Sun is tired. Behold him obscured, turned 
pale ; he has lost his rays. The living Sun of goodness, 
who sowed in the bosom of Isis his seed — every wholesome 
thing, had been able to create all things out of himself, 
except time, duration. One morning he disappeared. . . . 
He had been immolated by his cruel brother Typhon, who 
divided him with the sword, dismembered and scattered 
his body. The honor of man, his pride and his strength, 
his manhood, had been harshly mutilated. Where are 
these poor remains ? Everywhere, over the earth, in the 
waves. The stormy sea carried part of them as far as 
Phoenicia. 

Here we leave the domain of fables. It is a living real- 
ity, an excruciating recollection of the mutilations which 
were made (and are made) to prepare false women, young 
eunuchs, for the markets, who were sold for the Harems of 
the East. For a long time Phoenicia was the centre for 
these sales. 

Isis tore her hair, and went in search of her Osiris. 
With true African grief, the most ingenuous in the world, 
Isis, abandoned, without pride, confided to all nature 
the painful tortures of her widowhood, her regret, her 
poignant desire, the heart-breaking impotency in which 
she was to live without him. At last she found some of 
the members which the waves had carried off. She went 
as far as Byblos, in Syria, to recover them, and obtained the 
pledge that they should be returned. Only one part was 
wanting.* Profound despair! " Alas, this missing part 
is life ! Sacred power of love, if deficient, what becomes 
of the world ? Where can I find it ? " 

* The JOS, pala, or phallus, which being the physical agent for procreation, 
was made the symbol of Life. — Ed. 



Egypt — Death. 187 

She implored the Nile and Egypt. Egypt was unwill- 
ing to surrender that which would be for her the assurance 
of eternal fecundity. 

But such great love and grief well deserved a miracle. 
In the violent contest of tenderness and of death, Osiris, 
although dismembered and cruelly mutilated, by a power- 
ful will, revived and returned to her. And so great was 
his love, that by the strength of the heart, he found a last 
desire. He came back from the grave to make her again 
a mother. Oh ! how eagerly she received this embrace. 
. . . Alas! It was nothing more than a farewell. The 
ardent bosom of Isis will not warm this icy germ. No 
matter. The fruit born of it, sad and pale, indicated no 
less the supreme victory of love, which, fruitful before life, 
is still so after death. 

The comments which have been made on this very 
simple legend lend it a deep meaning of astronomical 
symbolism. And certainly the coincidence of the destiny 
of man with the course of the year, the decadence of the 
sun, etc., was early felt. But all this is secondary, ob- 
served later, and added. The first origin is human ; it is 
the real wound of the poor widow of Egypt, and of her 
inconsolable sores. 

On the other hand, we must not be deceived by the 
coarse African coloring. There is here something more 
than the regret of physical desire and unsatiated passion. 
With regard to such suffering, Nature would have had a 
ready answer. But Isis did not wish simply a male, she 
wished him whom she loved ; her own, and not another ; 
him, and him only. It was a feeling entirely exclusive 
and individual. It is to be seen in the infinite care she 
takes of his mortal remains, so that not one atom shall 
be wanting, and death shall make no change in them, but 
some day shall render, in its integrity, this unique object 
of love. 

In this most tender, altogether pure and ingenuous le- 
gend, there is an astonishing zest of immortality which has 



1 88 Bible of Humanity. 

never been surpassed. Be hopeful, ye afflicted hearts, sad 
widows, little orphans. You weep ; Isis also wept, but 
she did not despair. Osiris, the dead, still lives. He is 
here, renewed in his innocent Apis. He is now the shep- 
herd in the underworld of souls, the complaisant keeper 
of the world of ghosts, and your dead are near him. 
Fear nothing, they are there. They will return some 
day and reclaim their bodies. Let us envelop with 
care their precious mortal remains. Let us embalm 
them with perfumes, with prayers, with burning tears. 
Let us keep them near us. Oh ! the delightful day 
in which the Father of souls, coming out from the dark 
kingdom, will return to you the cherished souls, rejoin 
them to their bodies, and say: " I have preserved them 
for you." 

Up to this point all is natural. A beautiful popular 
tradition added to it an incredible excess of goodness. 
It was said that Isis, in her melancholy excursion, when 
she was looking for the remains of her husband, found 
something black, bloody, and shapeless, — a little new- 
born monster. She knew by its color that it was an 
offspring of the black Typhon, her enemy, her tormen- 
tor, the ferocious murderer. This child was Anubis, the 
figure of a grave-digger, with the head of a dog or a 
jackal, as seen on the monuments. But the adorable 
goddess, in the presence of this feeble creature, that 
was crying or yelping, felt only compassion. Goodness 
was stronger than love and grief. She raised it from 
the ground, and took it in her arms. She could have 
had it brought up and nourished by another; but Isis 
is all tenderness and mercy. She could not do any- 
thing by halves. She pressed the odious nursling to 
her bosom, to her deeply-lacerated heart; in tears she 
smiled on it, and magnanimously ended by giving it 
the breast. Spectacle truly divine ! Let all the earth 
behold ! The widow of the murdered one nourished the 
child of the murderer. Satiated with the milk of good- 



Egypt — Dea th. 189 

ncss, bathed with the tears of love, the monster became 
a god.* 

This is the most tender conception of the human mind. 
I do not see anything in either the myths of India, or the 
Christian myths, that can be compared to it. The myth 
of Egypt declared that race innocent which the middle 
ages believed to be devilish, damned ; it established this 
fact, that crime was not transmissible ; that the child of 
the criminal (black as his father) is no less worthy of 
celestial compassion ; that divine goodness admits him to 
rise, to mount to God. 

The result is beautiful. This black child, this son of 
crime, by his illegitimate birth doomed to death, and yet 
consecrated to life by his nurse, became the genius of the 
between life and death, the good genius who in- 
terpreted the two worlds. f He understood everything, 
knew all mysteries, created all art. It was he who fixed 
memory, in which the fleeting generations will be pre- 
served and consecrated. He formulated and calculated the 
year. lie invented writing, which chronicles the remem- 
brance of the months and years. His art gives to our 
mortal remains that stability which enables us to await in 
bonds the day of resurrection. But the supreme office of 
Anubis, and his highest benefaction, was to welcome, to 
reassure, and to lead the poor soul at the moment that it 
left the body. The soul, a sad bird, wandering, entered a 
strange world. Did it sleep ? Was it awake ? This is well 
exhibited in a magnificent copy of the Book of the Dead, 
on a mantel-piece of the Louvre. The soul, represented 
as an interesting young man, does not know what to do, 
but is in good hands. The dear Anubis touches his heart, 
and strengthens it. "What dost thou fear? I answer 
for thee. . . . Fear not the Judgment. . . . If I, the black 

♦Anubis is declared by Plutarch {his and Osiris, 14), and other writers, to 
have been the offspring of Osiris and Nephthys, wife of Typhon.— Ed. 

% He was styled the -\r\Z, peter, or opener, because he opened the mysteries 
of the underworld. — Ed. 



i go Bible of Humanity. 

son of Typhon, have passed in safety, thou, innocent, 
pure in thy white robes, hast not reason to be alarmed. 
Come ! the good Osiris awaits thee." 

While writing this, I glanced over the plates of the 
grand Descriptions — those of Champollion, of Rossellini, 
and of Lepsius. With my heart filled with these sublime 
myths, I was anxiously looking for images of reality to 
bring them out clearly. One plate arrested my attention, 
and made me think.* It was that in which a sub-farmer, 
at the head of his cattle, was going to render his account 
to a scribe, who notes the number, and writes down 
whether the flock has increased or diminished. The 
peasant, still young in appearance, beardless, as all 
Egyptians, stands with arms folded over his breast, in the 
posture of religious respect. The scribe, by no means 
imposing, is the agent of the king or the priests. It is 
known by the beautiful history of Joseph, that all the land 
of Egypt belonged to the king, except one-third, which, 
according to Diodorus (i., 40), belonged to the sacerdo- 
tal order. Property, in Egypt, was scarcely anything more 
than a tenantry. From the Pharaohs to the Ptolemies, to 
the Sultans, to the Beys, the sovereign had the land culti- 
vated by whom he wished. He was at liberty to make 
each generation pay, to compel the son to redeem the 
land which his father had occupied. The results of such 
a system are known. It made misery perpetual in the 
richest country in the world. At the death of the father, 
the family knew not its destiny. At the moment in which 
the embalmers entered, with the chisel in their hands, the 
son and the mother fled in tears, and abandoned the body 
and the house. The next day another proceeding took 
place. The scribe of the king, or of the priest, entered, 
pen in hand, and reckoned the animals ; and from his re- 
port it was decided whether the family had increased the 
cattle and deserved to be continued. I think the plate, to 



* Rossellini, in folio, vol. ii. , plate 30. 



Egypt — Death . 191 

which I have referred, exhibits a scene of this kind. At 
the foot of the scribe is seen a prostrate female figure, so 
very humble, as to appear terrified — as if praying and 
entreating. Is she the wife, or the mother of the tenant ? 

The poor family underwent at once two judgments. 
Could the survivors retain the occupancy? Would the 
dead person be judged worthy to enter the sacred tomb? 
The priest alone decided. 

Enormous privilege, which, among people so tender in 
their family attachments, accorded to the priests un- 
bounded terror. 

Overwhelming servitudes carried the men away inces- 
santly. Everything was performed by manual labor. 
Rameses employed one hundred and twenty thousand 
men at one time to erect one of the obelisks of Thebes.* 
To cut and smooth the basalt, the granite, and the 
porphyry, with the rude tools of that time, how many 
men and centuries were necessary? A man taken in youth, 
recently married, wasted his life in the quarry, and did 
not re-enter his home until bowed with age. Oh ! how 
many human lives, chagrins, and tears, in the building of 
the Pyramids, those true mountains of grief, in the enor- 
mous cemeteries of the low lands on the side of Libya ! 
And how much despair in the subterranean perforations 
of the mountain-chains on the Arabian side, in those 
rugged rocks which eternal labor changed into funeral 
bee-hives ! Thousands of living men, in order to hollow 
those abodes of the dead, have lived by the lamp-light 
only. Dead themselves, if we may so say, having no day, 
no sky, but in the smoky vaults of the sepulchre. 

"The sacred characters were only known by the priests, \ 
and ignored by the people, by those numerous masses 
whose years were wasted by engraving them on the granite. 
All the complications of the three Egyptian styles of 
writing are known : symbolism, short-hand, and ordinary 

* Letronne : Acad., xviu, 34. 

f DlODORL'S. 



I92 Bible of Humanity. 

alphabet. Is this figure before me a man, or an idea? 
Is it a sentence or a letter? Overwhelming enigmas, 
which surely the head of the stone-carver could scarcely 
have unravelled. Admitting that he could have read those 
terrible inscriptions, and pierced the mystery under the 
obscurity, what would he have found? The obscure 
meaning of the sacerdotal religion, the hidden doctrines of 
emanation, by which the gods, issued one from another, 
easily re-entering one another, mingled and confounded 
one with another, precisely as in the black conduits which 
had been pierced in those mountains, the funeral labyrinth 
became entangled and confusing. 

Neither the characters nor the thoughts were intelligible 
to the people. But the harshest thing is that Egypt had 
for ten thousand years* pined away in this enormous 
work, without even the consolation of understanding its 
sense and purport. Alas ! where is the good, popular 
religion, so touching and so clear, summed up in Isis ? 
What has become of it ? Isis is still seen in the monu- 
ments near the kings, as adviser, as protectress. But in 
reality the active and master spirit in all this was the wise 
god Thoth, — an elevated, refined form of Anubis. This 
religion of goodness, which issued from the heart of a 
woman, was changed by him, and became a system, a 
laborious system, pervaded with dogmas and observances, 
a scholasticism of priests. 

Death was the only hope for the man and woman so 
frequently separated. In that hot region where the sun 
splits the stone at mid-day, the poor laborer prayed 

* Plato : Laws, ii., 3. " This doctrine has been known among them from 
antiquity ; . . . they exhibit them in their temples ; and except there, it is not 
lawful either for painters or others who work out forms, or whatever else 
there may be, to introduce any innovation, or even to think of any other than 
those of the country ; . . . and you will, by observing, discover that what have 
been painted and sculptured there ten thousand years ago — and I say ten 
thousand not as a word, but a fact, ovx wc kirog enreiv fivpiocrov aXk' ovtuh;- 
are neither more beautiful nor more ugly than those turned out of hand at 
the present day, but are worked off according to the same art. — Ed. 



Egypt — Death. 193 

this sun to give him, by its liberating stroke, rest forever 
with and near his wife. On her part, the woman cultivat- 
ing the earth, with her son, subjecting herself to many 
fastings, thought of nothing but of the accumulation of the 
little money for the embalmment. 

If either of them failed in this end ! If he was so un- 
fortunate as to be judged unworthy of the sepulchre ! and 
his wife condemned to eternal widowhood ! . . . Painful 
thought which troubled the mind and spoiled even death ! 

The soul, the best soul, could not attain a second birth, 
except through a laborious series of transformations.* 
What, then, would become of the doomed soul, which, 
alone and without a god to conduct it, took this terrible 
journey? Horrible and unclean, it was changed into a 
swine, which was detested by the Egyptians as well as by 
the Jews. Fantastical monsters intervened to debar the 
way. With these the soul had to fight. To crown the 
whole, it was scourged by malevolent guardians. Query, 
Ape-demons ? Leopard-demons ? f 

Heboid the swine into which, according to the gospel, 
Jesus sent the demons. Behold the Middle Ages, the 
beginning of the elements of those traditions of terrors, 
which have so cruelly narrowed and perverted the mind. 
The agony was frightful. As in the dark Christian cen- 
turies (the tenth, eleventh, and so on) the dying man, 
believing that he would be carried away by demons, had 
recourse to the invocation of saints, and had himselt 
covered with relics, so the Egyptian was so frightened 
that the one guardian, Thoth or Anubis, could not reas- 
sure him. lie feared for each limb, and for each claimed 
the aid of a special god. He caused himself to be upheld, 
not by four, but by fifteen or twenty divinities. A god 

•In an inscription, Ahmes, chief of Mariners, intending to say: "/was 
ftru t n said " I have accomplished my transformations." — Ue Rouge, Acad, 
of /use rip. M. des savants etrangers, 1S53, vol. III., p. 55. 

f I cannot distinguish which of the two by the plates of Champollion. (In 
folio, vol. III., plate 272.) 
13 



194 Bible of Humanity. 

was responsible for his nose, and kept it secure. Another 
warranted his teeth, another his eyes, another his neck. 
The terror was so excessive that he was not satisfied with 
having the arm protected, but must also have a guardian 
for the elbow ; and so with the leg and knee.* 

Spirits did not appear by day, so that the living could 
act. At night they walked over the earth, even the bad 
spirits. Hence a thousand fears, a thousand spectres. 
No safety at the hearth. The innocence of animals, their 
peaceful manner, sometimes gave assurance. Hence, 
probably more than from anything else, the excessive at- 
tachment to these good companions ; hence the touching 
small talk, the worship of the sacred animals, the gentle 
friends of man, that cared for him in life and death. 

Where ends the animal ? Where begins the plant ? 
Who can tell ? Sensitive plants, Ampere remarks, in this 
powerful climate, approach the animal. They have their 
fears and their dislikes, as if they were delicate women, 
fixed by fate to a single spot ; without language, without 
the means of flying or escaping. Palm-trees evidently 
love. In all ages, in Egypt, the people assisted them in 
their loves. The male plant, separated from its love, was 
drawn near by the ready hand of man. 

The tree moans and weeps, as with a human voice. 
The French in Algiers, who were cutting trees in 1840, 
were surprised and almost frightened at hearing them 
groan. An illustrious, learned man was present, and was 
troubled, moved, as the others. What must have been 
the impression of those sighs of the tree, of those heart- 
rending complaints on the mind of the poor Fellah ! How 
could he doubt that a wretched soul, like his own, was 



* Champollion had already given one of those rituals of the dead, in the 4th 
vul. of Cai Maud's Journeys. Lepsius published one complete in 1842, in 
quarto, and M. DE Rougk has given another, in folio, in this very year, 1864. I 
sec in it the most curious things. The soul has to fight the fantastic animals. 
It is forbidden to work in Ker-neter, to leave (the Amenti) the infernal re- 
gions (luring the day. When it rises again it will recover its heart, etc. 



Egypt — Death. 195 

under the bark ? The tree, being rare in Egypt, is so 
much the more loved and cherished. He who had the 
happiness to have one at, or near his door, lived with it. 
He related everything to it, confided to it his fears and 
his griefs, the exactions of the scribe or the overseer, the 
excessive work, void of consolation, and alas ! sometimes 
other wounds, cruel and from the beloved hand. In brief, 
he trusted it with his heart, deposited it, hid it in the 
tree. The Jfit/iosa, which shudders and feels everything, 
sometimes received this heart ; also the Persian laurel, the 
tree of [sis, admirable tree ; its leaf a tongue, its fruit in 
the form of a heart.* 

But what part of the tree is sufficiently discreet to re- 
ceive this delicate deposit ? The trunk ? perhaps, because, 
when cut, it moans. Or, is it the branch, which, between 
itself and the trunk, can press and hide, unite maternally ? 
Or is it simply the (lower? In the cases of the mummies, 
the painted flower is half open, permitting a small head to 
pass, the pretty soul of a woman. If such an Acacia 
closes its flower at evening, it is to preserve the heart of 
man. 

Great and profound secret. This Egyptian tree is not 
like that of Persia, the sublime Tree of Life. It is a rest- 
less tree. It may be ruthlessly cut down to-morrow for a 
boat, or a palace. What then becomes of the heart? 
The man trusted the secret of his deposit to only one per- 
son, to his unique, beloved spouse, putting his life in her 
hands. We may imagine with what veneration the woman 
regarded the tree, after the death of her husband ! How 
sacred, and what a confidant ! How consulted, how list- 
ened to in those hours of security when alone. It was the 
successor ; it was a husband, a lover, an altar, a dead and 
living god, often bathed with tears. 

Such things only happen in true love, in monogamy, 
the holy, solemn, and tender marriage, as it was in Egypt. 
The tree did not fail to be moved and to answer. The 
* Plutarch, 



196 Bible of Humanity. 

wife often lived on the tears shed by the tree, — tears of its 
own kind, vegetable tears doubtless, of the pine and many 
other trees. Was this friendly compassion ? Was this 
really the soul of the dead imprisoned under the bark, 
pressed, suffering, which, in order to reveal itself in its 
poor language, wept this sentence to her : " I still love " ? 

This touching faith, which has made the tour of the 
world, had its primitive, its purest type, in Egypt. 

The sepulchral boat of Isis, searching for Osiris, landed 
at Byblos, in Syria. I know not what, in the bottom of 
her heart, told her that he had stopped there, and was in 
the palace of the King. In order to be received there, 
Isis, although a queen, humiliated herself, and represented 
herself as a servant. She observed and watched every- 
thing. The magnificent palace, supported by columns, 
had one column (Oh ! miracle !) which wept. This was 
a pine-tree.* Isis had no doubt whatever that it was he. 
She divined the metamorphosis. It had floated to the 
coast, to the pine forest of Syria, and hidden itself in the 
sand; it became a pine-tree. Placed in the palace, it 
always remembered, and wept. Isis drew it from its posi- 
tion, embraced it, and flooded it with tears, and rendered 
it funeral honors. f 

* At Teneriffe, the pines, which have supported the houses since 1400, still 
weep. 

f This legend of the living tree, so sorrowful and sometimes comforting, 
appears to have had its origin in Upper Egypt, in the Acacia mimosa of the 
desert, continued in the Persca Laurus, in the pine in Syria, in the pome- 
granate and almond tree in Phrygia, etc. The unique literary monument, 
which, up to this day, we have from Egypt, very ancient in character, and 
certainly even more ancient in conception, starts from the acacia. It is a 
short personal story, which serves as the frame-work of the general and popu- 
lar idea. 

A very honest and laborious young man, named Satou, worked at his elder 
brother's, and made the cattle prosper. The wife of this brother, who was a 
beautiful woman, preferred Satou, because he was strong, and wished one day, 
at the burning hour of rest, to keep him with her. Despised, she accused him. 
He would have perished if his ox and cow, which loved him, had not put him 
on his guard. He swore his innocence, and assured it forever by a cruel muti- 
lation. Very desolate and alone, he retired into the desert and put his heart 



Egypt — Death. 197 

7 Acacia. The gods ha 1 compassion on him, and made for him a more 
beautiful and admirable wife, whom he loved so much as to entrust to her the 
tree in which he had placed his heart. 

This beloved but ardent woman, eagerly desiring an efficacious love, grew 
weary, and allowed herself to be carried off. The Nile bore her to Pharaoh. 

rse went with her. She thought she could end it by cruel means, by 
cutting down the tree of Satou. In vain. The poor heart became a magnifi- 
cent bull, which groaned ami marcd at her. It was killed. Two drops of 
its blood had fallen on the ground. Out of them sprang two trees, not the 
wretched acacia which was cut, but two sublime trees, two gigantic perseas, 
which chatted together of love, and sighed. The queen was frightened, and 

I them to be sawn down ; but a splinter separated and touched her so 

intimately, that she became with child. Satou had conquered her in spite of 

her>clf. li to the human form, was glorified, and became 

.^un. (All the same.) Now master of this cruel wife, he did 

not avenge himself, but only related to her what she had caused him to suffer. 

he translation and the very interesting notice, which M. de Rougk has 
given of this manuscript of the fifteenth century v.c.—Athenamm Francais, 
vol. i., p. 2S1. 1S52. 



1 98 Bible of Humanity, 



CHAPTER II. 

SYRIA— PHRYGIA — ENERVATION. 

In the funereal monotony of Egypt one feels his soul 
alienated, cramped (during a hundred centuries), and 
stifled, as under the tree of grief. The contrast is very 
striking when one gets out of such a place and enters the 
stirring world which lies round about it. It seems to him 
that a sea, a tempest of sand, like the whirlwind in the 
desert of Libya, or in that of Suez, is floating before his 
eyes. Among the blacks of the Upper Nile, in the en- 
campments of the Arabs, in the world separated from 
Syria, even in those great empires of the profligate 
Babylon and the barbarous Carthage, the mind seemed 
to be led astray, and to be in the midst of a chaos. 

The myths, which are luminous in Greece, harmonious 
in Egypt, and which maintain an appearance of wisdom 
even when most fantastical, here seem to whirl as the 
simoom of the desert. It has not been spoken enough of 
how much this south-west between Africa and Asia, where 
all is fragmentary, divided, unorganized, looks in its whim- 
sical worships, like a real dream.* 

* In the conscientious Egyptian paintings, which strike the beholder with 
their truthfulness, one may see what difference in countenance there was, 
seventeen centuries before Christ, between the Syrian, the Assyrian, the 
Arabian or the Jew, the Negro, and the European (the Grecian as it would 
seem). Those paintings are masterpieces indeed. The Grecian, who looks 
like a man of modern Greece, is the mariner of the islands, with a profile harsh 
and cunning, and with a piercing look. The Negroes are lively. In their ex- 
cessive and unconnected gesticulation it is very well shown that they are not 
stupid fellows, but that, on the contrary, they are too lively, of rich blood, unset- 
tled in their convictions, hot-headed, and half-mad. A precisely opposite type 
is exhibited in the stiff and unyielding Bedouin, the angular though not ignoble 
Arab, the rough and unprogressive Jew — pebbles of Sinai cut fine as with a 
tharp instrument. I am sure these will live and defy the action of time. But 



Syria — Phrygia — Enervation. 199 

Syria felt her god in the swarming sea, whose waves 
seethed and bubbled up a flood of living foam, oily and 
permeated with myriads of fishes. Like the Euphrates,* 
she had for her ideal the fish and the Female-Fish. 

Certainly, if the infinity of inferior love, of fecundation 
shows itself anywhere, it is undoubtedly in the fish. 
Fishes could fill the sea. They swamp it literally at cer- 
tain times, make it white and illumined with a fat, 
thick, and phosphorescent sea of 'milk. 

Behold the Venus of Syria ! It is Derceto, it is 
rti'' or Ashtaroth, who is male and female, the dream 
neration. The Hebrew, at the skirts of the desert, 
living poorly, dreams of a people as numerous as the 
whirling sand. The Phoenician, in the rich towns of 
badly-smelling ports, dreams of the infinity of tide, a 
people of amphibious beings, who stir and swarm from 
Seidon to Carthage and to the ocean. 

In the inland, the poetry oi' the amorous Syrian women, 
who are pretty and who woo lasciviously, was to dream 



the ephemeral and spurious figures "I" Babel and Phoenicia are shortdived, and, 
like in-ect>, continue their species through the ceaseless renewal of generations. 
The man of the live; I i- B fish; the man of Tyre is a frog. The 

low backward inclination <«f the forehead in the Babylonian figure reminds us 
of his god, and belongs to the aquatic world, the Magian fish. The man, 
however. i> not repulsive, nor i- he void of grace in his movements; he in- 
.-pireb m with confidence, and teems to bid us " Welcome." And thus is it 
that the ^ods of every land, and men of all nations, were attracted and fused 
together helter->kelter in Babylon, because of the easy and accommodating 
manners of the Babylonian-, who freely welcomed and admitted all on equal 
term-. Unlike the Babylonians, the Phoenicians are not dressed in beautiful 
and closely-fitting it with short jacket (of esparto ?) and naked arms, 

like a sailor, leaving their limbs free for action. Their eye is clear, and they 
seem like men accustomed to look at di-tant objects on the great plain of the 
sea. This picture, however strange, is beautiful and serious. More wonder- 
ful : they have no neck. Singular abortions, their precocious vices have ar- 
reted their growth. Their faces indicate cruelty and indifference, which fit 
them for their profession a> merchants; a horrible traffic in human flesh being 
the chief article of their commerce. 

* See the monuments in Kawlinson (1862), v. 1st, page 167, m Botta, 
A.USTKN, Lavard, etc. 



200 Bible of Humanity. 

of numberless doves, a people obscene and charming. 
Their violent caresses, their love-intrigues, very irregular, 
whatever may have been said to the contrary — were the 
spectacle and the lesson. And their consecrated nests, 
increasing day by day, could at their leisure whiten the 
sad cypress of Astarte. 

The Phoenicians carried away with them Astarte * on 
their ships, that they might have a good voyage. They 
worked on her behalf. Their great commerce consisted 
in carrying off doves — women, girls, or pretty boys — and 
taking them to the seraglios of Asia. Their religion was 
to raise, in every settlement which they founded, an altar 
to Astarte, a convent of soiled turtle-doves, who fleeced 
the foreigners.']' Cyprus and Cythera were defiled by 
this worship to such an extent that the girls of these 
islands underwent, each of them, the sacred blemish be- 
fore their marriage. % 

They were lucky enough to get off at such a price. 
For this Ashtoreth or Astarte, the Venus of pirates, was 
not always distinguished from the other god of the Phoe- 
nicians, whom they called the King (Moloch), and who 
was so fond of boys that he stole some of them every- 

* Venus Euplaea, the goddess of prosperous voyages by sea. — Ed. 

f Jacob Bryant describes the Sirens and Lamise of Italy as a Canaanitish 
priesthood, whose women, by their music and personal charms, seduced travel- 
lers and sea-faring men to repair to their temples. The Jewish Scriptures 
make frequent mention of them, Q^KHp and ni£Hp» men and women conse- 
crated to the sanctuaries. The liaison of Judah {Genesis xxxviii.) with his 
daughter-in-law, Tamar, was induced by the religious consideration that she 
was a holy woman, a minister of the temple, and not a harlot. All Syria, 
from Hierapolis and Cappadocia to Arabia and Egypt, swarmed with these 
votaries of Astarte, both male and female. 

% Herodotus: i., 199. "The Babylonians have one most shameful cus- 
tom. Every woman born in the country must once in her life go and sit 
down in the precinct of Venus [Mylitta or Astarte] and there consort with a 
stranger. ... A custom very much like this is found in certain parts of the 
island of Cyprus." — Ed. 

Also, Baruch, vi., 46. "The women also with cords about them, sitting 
in the ways, burn past iles for perfume," etc. — Ed. 

Also Strabo: xvi., and Ancient Symbol Worship, page 87, note. — Ed. 



Syria— Phrygia— Enervation. 2 oi 

where. This king, god of blood, god of fire, war and 
death, delighted himself in an execrable manner in clasp- 
ing living bodies to his iron bosom, heated to a white heat 
If the boy was not burned, he was mutilated. The iron 
made a woman of him. 

These Molochs, these cruel merchants, masters, and sul- 
tans everywhere, with their ships crammed with wretched, 
living human flesh, and with their caravans, who led those 
wretched beings away in long herds, had nothing what- 
ever to do with Syrian women. The latter were widows. 
At night, on the high terrace of their house, or on the dry 
wall which supported vine plants, they cried, dreamt, and 
told their griefs to the moon, the equivocal Astarte. The 
sulphurous breath of the swallowed-up cities blew from the 
South, and from the Dead Sea. 

They dreamt. Never were dreams so powerful. The 
Parthenogenesis, the force of the desire, which is fruitful 
without a male, burst out In the Syrian woman, who alone 
had two children. 

One of them was the Messiah-woman, who freed Baby- 
lon, which till that time had been a thrall of Nineveh, the 
great Semi ram is, who was born a fish, and became a 
dove, who married the whole earth, and at last wedded 
her own son. 

The other child was a god of sorrow, the Lord (Adonai 
or Adonis). He was born out of incest, and his worship, 
mixed with tears and amour, was also impure and in- 
cestuous. 

The great Syrian legend, the incest under its three 
forms, Semiramis, Lot, and Myrrha, ends in this feminine 
creation of immense importance, Adonis dead and risen. 
A sensual and weeping worship, and very fatal too, 
through which the world miserably went down the decliv- 
ity of enervation.* 

* It is necessary to trace it to its source, and to say a word about the 
remotest antiquity to give a clear idea of this worship. The foreigner is re- 
garded as unclean and abominable by the spiteful morals of those small tribes, 



202 Bible of Humanity. 

At all times, burials have been the occasion of the 
saddest follies.* Male and female mounters, feigning 
despair, blinding themselves with wine and tears, became 
utterly delirious, and ended by acting as if they had been 
dead themselves, cutting their own flesh, and outrageously 
staining it. Lot, who had seen the land sink into the 
flames, and lost his country and his wife, believed that 
everything, even the law itself, had come to an end. He 
was dead, he cared for nothing. They were at liberty to 
delude him as much as they wished. 

The Lot of Byblos is affliction. Gingras or Kinyras, 
the funeral harp, in this bad dream, is a king loved too 
much by his daughter. This daughter is Myrrha, the 

each of which thought itself to be the chosen people of God. To marry a 
foreign woman, to leave for her sake one's kindred, was held a crime, and as 
an incest. The only pure marriage, in their opinion, is with the near relative. 
For this reason the daughters of Lot, having seen their tribe perish, say : 
"There are men no more." Horror seized them at the idea of associating 
with a man of another tribe. But on the other hand the highest dishonor, ac- 
cording to Syrian ideas, would be to die a maid, without child, like a 
sterile fruit. They addressed themselves to the only man yet remaining, 
their own father ; they deceived him and had by him two sons, Moab and 
Ammon. In the book of Genesis there is not the least blame imputed to 
them for having done so. On the contrary, the Jews trace from Moab the 
descent of Ruth, the charming Moabitess, from whom sprang their kings — 
David and Solomon. The history of Lot does not differ at all from that of 
Semiramis, and of the real queens, Anaitis, Amestris, Parysatis, etc. They 
wish to maintain the unity of their stock against the confused life of the 
seraglio. For this purpose they marry or wish to marry their own sons, ac- 
cording to the custom of the Chaldean magians. This strange marriage in a 
country in which woman becomes old so soon, was indeed a kind of celibacy. 
It was perhaps a symbolical marriage, the mother having the title of wife, 
that she might repel any foreign woman, and at the same time making her 
female slave take her place. This Sarah and Rachel did, as it is related in 
Genesis. This marriage concentrated in the family the mysterious tradition 
of the arts of the magians, their astronomical attainments and industrial or 
medical formulas and receipts, of which they were extremely jealous. Two 
very ancient historians, Conon (quoted by Photius), and Xanthus of Lydia 
(Clem., Strom., Hi., 185), mention these marriages, as well as Euripides, 
Catullus, Strabo, Philo, Sextus Empiricus, Agathias, Origenes, Saint 
Jerom, etc. 

* See books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy. 



Syria— Ph rygia— Enervation. 203 

myrrh which is burned at funerals. Harp and myrrh, 
lugubrious things, have so much of affinity that they min- 
gle themselves during twelve nights. At length Gingras 
becomes indignant. But she does not, and, disconsolate 
on account of her love, she weeps, and will continue to 
weep under the shape of a myrrh-tree. 

" Was this tree a punished, an execrated one ? " By no 
means. The Syrian woman made of it the exquisite and 
perfumed being which made death charming. One of its 
beautiful, sweet-smelling tears was Adonis, who was such 
a pretty boy, that from that time there existed for her no 
other god. She called him " my Lord " (Adona'i), " my 
Baal" (proprietor, husband). She herself dreamed that 
she w.is his Baaltis, his A starts, who must possess him, 
arte* Hermaphrodite, Adonis wife of Adonis. And in 
order to reach the height of foolishness, her love-name 
was Salambo (Samalkis), the mad flute, which is dismal 
and furious, and which is played upon during the burials. 

But by making Adonis her Baal, she had cruelly pro- 
voked Baal- Moloch, the king, the king of Fire, the king 
of War, and of Death (Mars or Mors). This demon takes 
the form of a demoniac beast. He enters into a hog, or 
rather into a wild boar, and wounds the beautiful boy in 
the sexual part, kills him, or kills his power of love. 

Who could doubt about all this when his blood is still 
flowing? At Byblos there is a torrent, which, by a 
singular coincidence, becomes troubled and reddens at 
the time, described in the Song of Songs, when the season 
of rains is over, and the feverish blood runs quick in the 
emotion of a Syrian spring-time. "It is the blood, the 
blood of Adonis ! " 

Tears are a relief. Those mourning women were in- 
satiable of them. Every place echoed with their tears. 
At Byblos, they used to weep before the sea, while the 
warm wind blew from Africa, in the intoxication of spring- 
time. In Syria, at the end of September, when the vine 
mourned over the year, for it was the last month, they, 



204 Bible of Humanity, 

during seven days, till the first of October, used to rave 
and to blind themselves with tears, over the vintage-tub. In 
some places they could not wait for autumn, but during 
the harvest, under the piercing rays of the sun (Adonis), 
these mad female lovers welcomed him with abundant 
tears in his supreme victory. 

It was a rage for burials. They fancied, for everything 
was confused in their minds, to have lost their lover as 
well as their child. They made up an indifferent doll, 
which represented a very effeminate boy.* Over this 
wretched rag-baby, they, with heart-rending cries, per- 
formed the funeral rites and obsequies. They washed 
that doll, opened and embalmed it. Afterward they put 
it on a catafalque, and contemplated it for a long while, 
especially its cruel wound, which was made on its delicate 
side. They sat down in a circle on the floor, with their 
hair dishevelled, sometimes chanting litanies, sometimes 
holding their peace, and now and then heaving deep 
sighs. From time to time one of them said : " Alas ! my 
sweet Lord ! where is now your lordship ? " They were 
stifling. At the end of seven long days it was necessary 
to put an end to all this, it was necessary to part from 
each other, and to bury this unfortunate doll. And what ! 
To see him no more ! His Astarte, his Baaltis, the des- 
perate Salambo looked in vain for him. Was he dead ? 
. . . They took pains to make up a little miracle. In 
some flower-pots, prepared beforehand, they set some of 
those plants which heat causes quickly to blossom, and they 
exposed them on the roofs of their houses, on the terrace, 
where people sleep in Syria. These were the gardens of 
Adonis. Precisely on the seventh day they went up to 
see . . . and behold . . . the plant had burst out . . . 
the plant had flourished. Shouts of love were heard from 
terrace to terrace. " Oh ! joy ; the Lord had risen from 
the dead ! " 

* I follow closely the ancient texts, which the reader will find in Movers' 
Phoenicians, I., chap, vii., 190-253. 



Syria — PA rygia — Enervation. 205 

Everywhere the frantic Astarte seized again her young, 
living, entire, unmutilated lover. They reassured the 
world that it had lost nothing. They raised up the sign 
of fecundation (the phallus mephallityth or neuropast) as 
it was dune in Egypt. But there was a great, a very great 
difference in the purpose of so doing in the two countries. 
As to Isis, the African wife, it was the over-excitement 
of mutual happiness, and her adoration of her husband. 
As to the Syrian Baaltis, it was the blind intoxication, the 
indiscriminate tenderness, which welcomed the unknown 
friend in the foreign guest, in the passer-by, in a word, in 
Man. Adonis would have it so. The woman who forebore 
to do all this, and shut her door, had, for penance, to let 
fall her hair, and thus, with her hair cut close and ugly, 
had to remain for a long time without daring to appear in 
public. 

It seems that Kualtis-Astarte acted in antithesis to 
loch. This jealous, terrible king sacrificed men in 
order to keep, through dread, his colonies. She, on the 
contrary, opened the door of her house altogether to the 
ying : " The poor foreigner ! " Moloch, the 
great seller, the great mutilator — everywhere prepared 
Adonises for the seraglios. Astartd, on the contrary, 
worshipped the maimed boy. 

This seems to be a striking opposition, but indeed it is 
not. Unclean love is a kind of death. Moloch, in all his 
horror, was less dangerous than the deep abyss of Astarte. 
The amorous compassion, the effeminacy and the tears, the 
contagious delight of the rites of Adonis brought on the 
world the terrible and deadly fact : the disappearance of 
manly strength. 

Look at this progress of weakness. In Egypt, Osiris 
died, it is true ; but he did not die altogether, because, 
even dead, he became the father of Harpocrates. In 
Syria, the male was nothing more than a weak ado- 
lescent, who did nothing but die. There was no pater- 
nity in him. Adonis had no child. He was himself the 



2o6 Bible of Humanity. 

child. But in Phrygia, under another name, he sank still 
lower. 

The Syrian woman, although she looked languishing, 
was at the bottom violent and terrible, and incapable of 
resignation. She was full of boldness and prompt in doing 
good as well as in doing evil. Jahel, Deborah, Judith, 
and Esther, saved their people. Athaliah and Jezebel were 
monarchs. It was the same with Semiramis, the famous 
Dove of Ascalon, who flew away from Syria to the Euphra- 
tes. The goddess-fish, — Derceto, — got with child by the 
god Desire, and was delivered one fine morning of this 
strange creature. From a slave having become a queen, 
and being lascivious and warlike, she got rid of a husband 
who worshipped her, became wife of Ninus, the great king 
of the East, took away his life and usurped his throne. 
She dethroned also Nineveh, and made of Babylon, with 
its hundred gates and gigantic walls, an image of herself, 
a monstrous gulf of pleasure, which opened to everybody 
the shelter of its impure brotherhood. 

Babel was already the tower, the celebrated observatory 
of the Chaldean Magi.* She was the market, to which 
every year were brought from the upper Euphrates, and 
are still brought, f the wines of Armenia, which led to 
joyous festivity. She was an open city. The people of 
Asia were afraid of the walls and obscurity of cities. % 
The free chief of a caravan apprehended that if he stopped 
in a walled town he would be lost, robbed, sold, and 
perhaps killed there. When the conquest of Nineveh 
drove away its people to Babylon, this industrious people 
allured at any price all merchants and reassured them. 
The advice of Balaam (prophet of the she- ass or Baalpeor), 
as given in the book of Genesis, was followed to the letter — 
to seduce through woman. The haughty ladies of Babylon 
sat down at the gates, and invited the foreigner. What 
could be more reassuring ? Whoso that passer-by was, 

* Diodorus. f Rennell. % Herodotus. 



Syria— Ph rygiar— Enervation. 207 

from the East, from the West; of whatever race, a mer- 
chant, a chief of a tribe, a savage Ismaelite, a runaway 
perhaps, or a miserable slave, the great lady, in state 
and seated on a gulden throne, received from him the 
small sum which he threw on her knees. The Venus of 
•el imposed this duty of humility and equality. He 
ncd to buy her, for every marriage was a purchase, 
and, as it were, to marry her. Let him command! 
Was all this a merely symbolical ceremony ? But how 
proud must he have been in espousing Babylon, the 
great Queen of the East, " the daughter oj giants," of 
whom he has dreamed so much in the wilderness ! He 
felt himself beloved, adopted, and a Babylonian, himself 
acquired and bought forever. Such was the snare of this 
city. The foreigner, in passing over its threshold, lost 
his recollection. With that small sum, given to the beauti- 
ful smiling lady, he found presently that he had also thrown 
away into her hand his past, his country, his family, and 
the gods of his ancest 

All this went so far that he himself, in return, built and 
enlarged Babylon, working eagerly to raise the walls of 
his new country. As by a charm those walls rose two 
hundred feet high. The Magians, by a stroke of genius, 
had foreseen this, and had beforehand drawn astrono- 
mically, according to the number of days of the year, a 
city of three hundred and sixty-five stadia in circum- 
ference. The bricks were baked in the sun. There was 
plenty of asphalt. The whole was constructed at once, 
with a true rage of love, by the friends* the paramours, of 
Queen Semiramis, the symbolical personification of Baby- 
lon. The walls, a real chain of mountains, on which four 

* It results from the combined narrations of Herodotus, Ctesias, Diodorus, 
etc., that this enormous city, which contributed the third of the revenue of 
Asia, was traced beforehand, and built at one time ; that its walls, so pro- 
digious, were the spontaneous work of multitudes who took shelter there under 
the protection of the tower of the Magi. This reminds us on a grand scale 
of some constructions of the Middle Ages, as the cathedral of Strasbourg, 
which was built by the pilgrims, who worked at it day and night. 



208 Bible of Humanity. 

chariots could go abreast, suddenly lorded it over the 
country. The neighboring kings were in a rage, and 
threatened. But they ceased, when they saw that Babylon 
was unassailable. During two or three centuries it was 
the universal refuge, the ark of the arts of Asia, which 
wrapped them up and preserved them from the floods 
that lowered over the horizon. 

What a great spectacle to see so numerous a people 
become the children of this strange mother, who, under 
her vast robe, welcomed and sheltered any man, whether 
he was black or white, freeman or bondsman. The slaves 
themselves had festivals, in which their masters attended 
on them. The captives also were so well treated that 
they throve as in their own home, as it is seen in the 
case of the Jews. In the midst of this great confusion, 
people easily believed themselves to be brothers. Women 
helped each other to husbands, the ugly ones receiving 
their dowry from the beautiful. Sick persons placed them- 
selves confidently on the public squares and consulted 
the friendly multitude. 

Babylon, by the purchasing of mercenary soldiers from 
the North, became a conqueror. Her Magi or Nabi (Na- 
buchodonosor) frightened for a while the world, by carry- 
ing away and conducting to the Euphrates whole peoples, 
as Israel, Judah, etc. But this grandeur was not strength. 
The heterogeneous masses could only increase the discord- 
ancy of Babel, the confusion of mind, of languages, which 
has become a by-word. Babel and Babylon seem to be 
synonomous words, as barbarian in Greece, to signify a 
smatterer, a mumbler, who mixes many languages. Such 
medleys are injurious to the mind and produce giddiness. 
Witness the great Nabi who became a beast * The women 
there being more sober and more dispassionate, and whom 
no excess can exhaust, found themselves to be more and 
more the only males. Babylon itself was woman. The 

* Daniel, iv. 



Syria — Phrygia — Enervation. 209 

queens-magi, especially Nitocris, who governed glori- 
ously, made in vain some immense works of defense, in 
order to stop and delay the enemy. 

Persia made light of such defence, entered, and thought 
herself to be the mistress. But she was herself taken cap- 
tive in the long run. The old, voluptuous city embraced 
her, held her fast, and prepared for her a bed so volup- 
tuous that she grew soft in it and melted. The genius of 
the Magians, which was obscure, profound, unclean as 
well in its origin as in cunning and lust of power, and 
which had eaten the fruit of the tree of evil, perverted 
g ether the conquerors. The queen-mothers imitated 
the amours as well as the boldness of Semiramis. The 
pied the pride, and the downfall also, of the 
Nabuchodonosors. The Magians made up two idols, the 
idol King % protected on every side by that comedy of 
dread, which is seen on the monuments, the eagle-bull 
with a human face, etc. The other, the \do\-Mother, the 
Great Mother Mihr-Mylitta, or Venus, in which character 
they swallowed up all the gods of the East, and which 
they boldly placed between Ormuzd and Ahriman, as a 
Miiiiator, who domineered over Persia herself. 

Personified Voluptuousness, Mylitta, the true conqueror 
of .Asia, sat, at the summit of Babel, on a throne, and 
her lewd colossus wantonly reposed upon amorous lions. 
Between those beasts was the King of kings, whom she 
kept enervated and mild by the means of a Babylonian 
seraglio, in which every year were incessantly placed 
five hundred young creatures, a multitude "of fat chil- 
dren." * 

Mylitta, in the lower part of Babel, and under the low 
vaults where formerly the sacred dragons were fed, had 
her young unemployed priests, gallant, rosy, with painted 
faces,— counterfeit boys, counterfeit girls with false and 
delicate voice, victims of shame, who were hired for 

* Daniel, i. 
14 



210 Bible of Humanity. 

money, and in their immolation, saw the heavens open 
and told good fortune. 

This unclean religion spread fast. Mylitta gained 
ground in the West. In Lydia, in Phiygia, at the great 
slave-markets, at the manufactories of eunuchs, Mylitta 
was called Anaitis-Atys ; she was the Great Ma with 
numerous breasts, whom Greece called Cybele. In this 
confused country of Phrygia, a veritable chaos, where 
people mixed everything without understanding, Atys, by 
a monstrous legend, became the little male, the Adonis of 
this large Cybele. They imitated the Passion of Adonis, 
the holy week of Byblos. The cJiild was always repre- 
sented as mutilated, lost, recovered, and bewailed by 
women. The getting-up was still more pathetic, barbar- 
ous, grotesque, and very shocking. They did not take 
out a small image of wood, but a piece of bleeding flesh, 
which they set up as the head of Adonis, or his obscene 
relic. The horror was at its height. Then the tree of 
Atys appeared, — a pine-tree, as at Byblos, — enchanted, 
groaning, and full of sighs. The crowd, with dishevelled 
hair, prayed and called him up. At length a child burst 
out from the opened tree. Atys, in rising from the dead, 
was charming, worthy of admiration, in his equivocal 
gracefulness, both boy and girl at once, the uncertain 
dream of love. 

This drama of giddiness and of fancy was highly remun- 
erative. The priests of Asia Minor, like the ecclesiastical 
princes of Italy, traders in every way, speculated at the 
same time on piety, love, and fortune-telling. They drew 
from their Atys a lucrative brokerage ; and so grew rich, 
became kings and popes.* 

They pushed on their success, sending forth in every 
direction their missionaries and apostles, itinerant Atyses, 
mendicants, collectors with an ass, soothsayers, cunning 
merchants of prayers and expiations — true antique Capu- 

* Kreuzer by Guignaut : book III., ii., p. 80, et passim. 



Syria — PA rygia — Enervation. 211 

chins. They were half-eunuchs, and therefore safer minis- 
trants to lust, and they sold at the same time pleasure 
and penance.* These queer fellows, as the Flagellants, 
shamelessly exhibiting themselves under the lash, moved 
tender hearts to compassion. They bled, and women 
became delirious, and fainted away. 

Ik-hold the conquerors of the world. Antiquity will be 
swallowed up in their Atys-Sabaxius. 

* 1 Vublic % ii., 7. " Pedlar-priestl also, and prophets frequent- 

ing the gates of the rich, persuade them that they possess a power, granted 
them by the rifices Bad incantations in the midst of 

feasting^, whatever injustice has been committed by any one, or his fore- 
fatht : 

See also AJPUIJUUS : M ' Ifliar, viii.— Ki>. 






212 Bible of Humanity. 



CHAPTER III. 

BACCHUS-SABAZIUS — HIS INCARNATION — THE TYRANT. 

By looking at Greece invaded, penetrated by the 
gloomy gods of the East, I feel the same dismay which 
Athens felt when the sea was covered with the fleet of 
Persia, commanded by the Phoenicians ; the same dismay 
felt by Syracuse, when the vessels of Carthage brought 
thither its black Moloch. What will become of mankind, 
if the country of light is darkened with the worship of the 
Eastern gods ? 

They are all from Syria.* Everything passes through 
Syria, even that which is Egyptian or Chaldean. The 
uncouth gods of Phrygia, such as Atys-Sabazius, are the 
counterfeit of the Syrian gods, Adonis, Sabaoth. The 
Phoenician colonies are the great vehicle of this muddy 
torrent. 

Nothing is so strange as the metamorphosis through 
which those savage gods creep, and diffuse themselves 
into Greece. 

The stern Adonai of the desert, a mourner at Byblos, 
becomes the charming Adonis. Sabaoth, the lord of the 
seven heavens, of the myriads of stars, the ancient father 
of the Magians, and god of Sabaism, becomes Sabazius- 

* The antagonism between Phoenicia and Greece is not less evident than 
that between Carthage and Rome. On Adonis-Atys, .Sa&ztfZ/z-Sabazius, 
Mylitta (Mithras)- Venus, Baal-Peor, the ass belonging to Bacchus, see the 
Hebraic and Greek texts, especially Movers, I., 350, 365, 383, 668, 695. 
On Mithras-^ enus, see the Investigations of Layard, and especially his 
Memoirs (of vast erudition) on the worship of the cypress-tree. Acad, of In* 
script ions, vol. xxii. 



Bacch 2ls- Sabazius. 2 1 3 

Atys, a young martyr, whose Sabazian sorrow and noc- 
turnal festivals will last two thousand years. Ouite close 
by him, not only in antiquity, but in the Middle Ages, will 
reign the other demon, not less tenacious, but more' sly, 
the cunning Baalpeor of Syria, with long ears, the ass of 
wine, of lasciviousness, in an unmanageable manner given 
to Priapus. " Orientis partibus—adventavit asinus—pul- 
chcr et fortissimus" 

But those whimsical figures would have frightened 
Greece, if most of them had not passed through a great 
transformation, and had not been immersed, boiled, 
scummed, and fermented, not in Medea's caldron, but in 
the reeking vintage-tub of a rural god, who appeared to 
be innocent, a god whom one finds everywhere, the god 
of vintage, the god of the lively round,* and the coarse 
pranks which people play at vintage time. And hence 
springs up Dionysus Junc/uis-Sabacins, the chaos of gods, 
the false Mediator, the false Deliverer, the god of Tyrants, 
the god of Death. 

In the India of the Vedas we have noticed the fermented 
liquor, the Soma, which was the offering of Asia. It was 
replaced by wine. In going toward the West, it met with 
the vine, which was preferred to it, and which seemed 
more divine. Each year, this god in casks started from 
Armenia, loaded on leathern boats encircled with boards, 
and an ass was placed on them. He went down the 
Euphrates. The Chaldeans, who had but their bad palm- 
tree wine, drank with devotion this nectar of Armenia. 
The boards were sold. The ass was loaded with the 
leather, f bringing it to the highland. This amiable ani- 

* Bacchus comes from everywhere, receives all things, and absorbs every- 
thing. As the god of wine, of noisy agitation, of rounds and of dancers, he is 
a Thracian. (See Lobeck). Thracia and Phrygia are the classical lands of 
vertigo; the dtrzis-Jaticers continue the round of Bacchus-Sabazius-Atys ; 
most of them are venal drunkards, who whirl in order to drink, and drink that 
they may whirl. Ed. Gerhard {Griech. Mylhol., I., 467-512) exhausts 
in an admirable manner the theme on the Thracian, Grecian Bacchus, etc 

f The commerce of wine in that country, in our own time, is the same as it 



214 Bible of Huma n ity. 

mal, the pride of the East, that each year, without fatigue 
and in triumph, like a magian king, entered Babylon with 
the cheerful vintage, was warmly welcomed and honored. 
The title of Lord, Bel, Baal, was given to him. He was 
respectfully called Belpeor (Lord Ass). 

Respect even greater he received in Syria, where his 
lascivious gayety, and his amorous power, and his super- 
iority over man, astonished the Syrian women, as the 
prophet says. He was himself a prophet, and spoke under 
Balaam. The mountain on which he spoke is still named 
the Ass. On the whole he was a demon, Baalpeor, an 
unclean and voluptuous demon, who serves everybody 
and all purposes, allows people to get upon his back, and 
to bridle him. 

It is on the mountain of the Ass that the angels them- 
selves, inspired by Baalpeor, burned in lust for the daugh 
ters of men.* Even in the wilderness, as Ezekiel says, 
the festival of the ass was already celebrated. However, 
he did not go to Egypt, where his neck would have been 
broken without mercy. He went toward the North, 
toward the West, solemnly preaching the cultivation of 
the vine from which people have wine, the cadet brother 
of Love. 

The ass would have invaded every place, and would 
have been Priapus and Bacchus. His personality, quite a 
comical one, prevented him from being such. He could 
not have become the voluptuous Proteus of tears and of 
joy. He could not have played the child to affect women. 
He could not have made of himself a tortured beautiful 
boy. He could never have created the spectacle of the 
Pathejnata {Passion). 

This spectacle appears to have had its origin in Crete, 
through the tradition of the child given up to the Minotaur 

is related in Herodotus to have been in his time. Rennel, etc. See (besides 
Movers) the texts collected by Daumer, Ghillany, Kreuzer, Rolle, 
etc. , on the ass of Babylon, of Balaam, of the Talmudists, of Bacchus, etc. 
*St. Hilaire. 



Bacchus-Sabazius. 2 1 z 

cchus). The child represented Bacchus, the victim 
took the place of the god. This little Bacchus, or Zagreus, 
torn to pieces and immolated on the tumbrel of the vin- 
made people first laugh and afterward cry, on 
account of his screams and his tears, the false blood which 
flowcd - 7V *n of Zagreus, a tragi-comical one, 

represented at Athens and everywhere, was the beginning 
of the Greek theatre, as the theatre of the Middle Ages 
in with the Mysteries, the kindred of the Passion. 
Women, in their little Mysteries of springtime and 
autumn | Anthesteria and Thesmophoria) festivals, in which 
her Ceres twice a year expressed the rights of love— 
women, I say, found it very gentle to have in their arms 
the fruit of love, to carry to those festivals a little child, 
whom they called lacchus. Bacchus, under the form of a 
child, entered Eleusis, with his tragi-comedies, his Passion 
of a god torn limb from limb, his incestuous equivocation 
of obscure symbolism. Lamentable additions. The grain 
died and lived again, so also did Proserpina. Bacchus 
died and rose again. It was a drama in a drama, which 
made intricate this beautiful and great moral theme, with- 
out strengthening it.* 

It has been said, not without some grounds, that this 
Iras the heathen mass. The initiated partook of the supper 
of Demeter, of the bread, and the mixed beverage, which 
she drank in her gloomy courses, in her motherly Passion. 
This was a communion under both species, to which, how- 
ever, Bacchus did not add that of wine. But in his own 



•LOBECK'S Aglaophamns is, and will be, the chief, most complete, and 
most critical book on this subject. All the texts are there brought together, 
judged and elucidated with peculiar strength. This thaumaturgy of Mys- 
teries, confused and obscure, fumeous as it was, was not wholesome for 
the mind, Daochus had spoiled the ancient and charming myth of Ceres. 
This i. the reason why Socrates and Epaminondas would not be initiated in 
them. Nevertheless there couM be no immodesty in the Mysteries at Eleusis. 
A serious lady, the hierophantides, superintended. At the altar a young boy 
was always present. Diodorus and Galienus say that people brought back 
from them always pure and pious ideas. 



216 Bible of Humanity. 

festivals he took an inferior name, the name of Ampelos 
(vine), and offered himself in funeral sacrifice. Bacchus- 
Vine gave up himself, and immolated himself to Bacchus- 
Pluto, and pretended to die for us.* 

He is here evidently the mediator who mitigates the 
passage, and gently leads the souls from this world to 
another ; who takes upon himself to plead for man and to 
pray for him. He could act on man's behalf because he 
had not been a god at first, but simply a hero, an heroic 
man. Humanity, at this strange epoch, seemed to think 
itself unworthy of speaking to God. It needed inter- 
mediate agents, guides, and interpreters. Mithras in the 
nether world, and Bacchus on earth, will already speak for 
us. God and man have two languages. Behold ! they 
are separated ! Man is deprived of the glorious privilege 
of a direct intercourse with God. Oh ! what an immense 
fall ! Is heaven higher? I do not know. But I am lower. 

The wise had at first energetically struggled against 
Bacchus. We have seen the war of Apollo against him, 
the memorable contest between the flute and the lyre. 
The lyre killed Marsyas, the flute killed Orpheus. The 
followers of Pythagoras at first opposed Bacchus, aiming 
at purity, but nevertheless submitted to the vanquisher. 
They adopted him in their Orphean hymns, in which they 
wished to reconcile everything, — uniting helter-skelter the 
Phoenician Love (or Desire), the Greek Zeus, and the new 
Mysteries with Bacchus. 

Thus the wise and unwise, the pure and the unclean, 
all took sides with him. Plato, against Socrates, and the 
Socratic spirit, wished to have a Mediator of love. \ This 

*Kreuzer: Symbolik, iii., 1027. 

f "Man, the eldest of the gods, is born of Love and Chaos." This is a 
piece of Phoenician doctrine which one wonders to see in the Birds of Aris- 
tophanes. But it had probably remained, together with the power of the 
Eastern Venus, in the islands and Grecian ports, and ancient Phoenician colo- 
nies. Philosophers rashly and too easily lay hold of these Asiatic ideas, 
which they understood very badly. Pythagoras copied Egypt, and Pherecydes 
copied Phoenicia. They thought to follow some ideas, and did not see that 



Bacch us- Sabazius. 217 

is a great part, which Eros, the winged child, will never 
assume in Greece ; but it accrues altogether to Bacchus, 
ever since irresistible, all-powerful, carrying away every- 
thing. 

Art contributed not a little to bring this about, followed 
the decline, and made it more rapid. 

Bacchus, in his statues, at first was manly enough. A 
son-in-law, a son, a husband of Ceres, according to his 
various names, he was noble still, when, in the last act of 
the Mysteries, he lay beside the venerable goddess, on a 
triumphal bed. Equal to Jupiter of heaven in the statues 
of Polykleitus, represented with the eagle and the thunder- 
bolt, and being the Jupiter of the nether regions, with the 
holy cup of the dead ; Savior in heaven, on earth, in the 



they were following the sinking of the world, which had become general 
through the fall of the empires of Asia. Persia became effeminate, received 
the Mihr, the Mylitta of Babylon, a mediator of love. Will this dogma en- 
ter Greece ? Could not one hope that the logic, the school of analysis, and 
of the Socratic good sense would shut it out ? Socrates, a few days before his 
death, had, in his admirable Eutiphron, formulated the inmost depth of the 
Grecian idea, the Lazv, a queen of the gods themselves, shutting the door of 
heaven to the tyrant gods of favor and of love. Now this very god of love, 
the true eastern tyrant, indifferent to justice (or rather an enemy to Law), 
comes in through a false door. Which ? The very school of Socrates, when 
it was divided and jarring. Plato, the great artist, willingly took doubtful and 
incoherent glimpses from the hypogea of Egypt, or from the smoking volca- 
noes of Sicily. The poetry of the Mediator of love troubled him, and also 
won him over. In the wonderful dialogue of the Symposium, a shocking, 
sublime, and austerely licentious dialogue, he puts into the mouth of Socrates, 
his teacher, a doctrine which was to undermine utterly the Socratic teaching. 
" What is love? A god? No ; for he has desires, and is not sufficient to 
himself. A man ? No ; for he is immortal. He is a being who stands between 
the mortal and the immortal. He is the Mediator, who is the link of all 
things. . . . Love is a demon, Socrates, a great demon ! God not revealing 
himself immediately to man, those spirits are his interpreters." (Plato, Ban- 
quet, 229.) All this is said slightly, and with a laughing gracefulness. Then 
comes a charming story. Then follows a bold scene, which modem readers 
find to be shameful, but which the light cynicism of the Greeks surely relished, 
and which made this little book pass quickly from hands to hands. Its con- 
sequences have been incalculable for the ruin of Greece, and the impairment 
of the human mind. 
IO 



2 1 8 Bible of Humanity, 

underworld, and opening hope everywhere, he appeared 
the god of gods. 

But he was indeed woman, and as such he appeared 
more and more. He became Adonis, Atys, and Sabazius, 
the womaned youth, whom Nature, by mistake, had digni- 
fied with the sex of man. Somnolent and with half-closed 
eyes, he seems to be only a lazy beautiful woman. This 
beauty asleep has the unwholesome charm of a marsh 
under flowers, and is quite different from Eros, the lively 
and wild boy, who is all sparks.* Art made him more 
and more effeminate, daring not indeed represent him 
with a woman's breast, but making him the indecent rival 
of Callipyges. All this by degrees till he became the 
young, fat, a little bloated, and gloomily unchaste Bac- 
chus of the column of Nero's gardens. He fixes a sad and 
haughty look on the sun, but the sun blushes in seeing 
him. 

Vain fables embellished this favorite. People without 
any respect for Homer, who had pointed out at the 
cowardice of Bacchus, made of him a Hercules fighting 
with the Titans. They made him a conqueror of India, 
giving him tigers to draw his chariot, instead of the ass, 
which is his riding animal. They sang his praise, as 
having strolled about the whole earth, amphora in hand, 
and overthrowing the strongest through the invincible 
force either of wine, or beauty. 

I do not know how Aristophanes, the undaunted comic 
author, dared in his Frogs show the true Bacchus like a 

* The ordinary model of Eros was evidently the eager, shining Greek boy, 
with a piercing look, in a word, a Spirit. This exalted all. The high admira- 
tion, which made him divine, felt in him the hero, and wished that he were 
such. The model of Bacchus, on the contrary, is a mild, feminine, soft, deli- 
cate beauty : that of the northern slave : there is no such thing in the South. 
Sometimes he lifts to the sky a look of sadness, and sometimes he closes his 
eyes. If one has a will to do so, one can make of him the Genius of Sleep, 
at the Lomsre, or that of gentle Death, the amiable and hoped-for deliverer of 
the slave {Bibl. Imper., engravings of ancient statues). Baleful conceptions 
of a very corrupting art, which softens the heart with amorous compassion for 
this dangerous son of dream and caprice, in whom is the heart of the Tyrant. 



BaccJi us- Sabazius. 219 

fat, unclean, cowardly woman, who is frightened to death 
for nothing. If he wished to vilify him, his attempt was 
a failure. Bacchus was the worshipped mistress, the 
popular darling. The Grecian peoples, among whom the 
enfranchised and the slave already ruled, — the false Athens 
which had replaced the true one, — acknowledged them- 
selves in him, found him charming, and honored him pre- 
cisely as a gluttonous and cowardly slave, especially as an 
enemy to labor, or as Idleness and Drunkenness incar- 
nated. He was just the King, the Tyrant they dreamed 
of. 

This was the terrible power of Bacchus. He was the god 
of tyrants and of slaves. I le was the good tyrant of drunk- 
enness and of hazard, of happiness and Good Lnck. He 
was the Deliverer, who unbound and untied (Eleuthereus, 
Lysios, Lyaeos) ; he untied man from the cares of the 
year, of the works of summer, in order to enter in the 
vintage. In autumn, in spring time, he made the festival 
of the slave. He nourished him with hope, with the 
chimera of the kingdom of Bacchus, and of the lawless 
life, in which to drink and to sleep will be the only law. 

A god who untied all, was, of course, himself unbound, 
and without girdle ; his Bacchantes also were so, in sign 
of ease. No more mine and thine, no more boundaries. 
Especially no more labor ; Bacchus had abolished it. In 
its place, he had instituted an eternal banquet, in which 
he will make the shares. His diadem seems to bear his 
name (Isodetes) the Divider. 

If he untied everybody, will he not unbind woman ? At 
first he gave her the freedom of tears, sensual tears, — " the 
sweetness of crying." With his laughing train of Satyrs 
and Silenuses, he was pre-eminently a mourner. The 
Grecian woman, sadly sedentary, opened her heart en- 
tirely to Bacchus, and poured forth her loves in tears.* 

* Women superabounded (Aristoph., Acharn.). And, on the other hand, 
they were driven to despair (Id., Lysistr., v., 231), since men had entirely 
perished at Miletus and elsewhere. At Athens, the inexcusable indifference 



220 Bible of Humanity. 

She was always in company of her inseperable, indispen- 
sable, and confidant nurse, who was either a tender and 
foolish woman from Thracia or Phrygia, or a cunning 
Milesian, or a sweet female friend from Ionia. The 
sweetness was in going in the evening to cry together at 
Bacchus-Adonis', at the vespres of Syria, in which, during 
three entire nights, the dove sighed and groaned. People 
laughed at this. But they did not laugh at all, when on 
a certain evening, at the moment in which the fatal expe- 
dition of Sicily was decided on, a song of sorrow filled 
the city. It was the ladies who were crying over . . . 
their country ? No; . . . but over the death of Adonis.* 

Fear attends vain sorrow. Demons, evil spirits, be- 
stirred themselves, going and returning. It was an epi- 
demic. The maid was sick for it. She was told " to get 
married as soon as possible." But the wife was not any 
more tranquil. Many were so much haunted by the 
demons, that they were driven to despair, and strangled 
themselves. Their dreads, their shocks, spread the sacred 
sickness, the scourge of epilepsy. f 

Movement, dance, the thyrsus, the noisy orgies are 
surely a remedy against fear. Women, who, under the 
guard of their nurse, hardly went in the evening to their 
modest Mysteries, now found themselves so bold that they 
went by troops to Eleusis, nay to the desert promontory; 
nor is this all, but they went to Delphos, to Parnassus. 
They wept as though each of them were a Thyades, and 
were delirious as Bacchantes. But, wonderful to be told ! 
each of them was also a Mimallone ', the warrior of Bac- 
chus, and bore the thyrsus and the dagger. 

This soft Bacchus was a god of Death. The Bacchantes 
took from him their name, the servants of Pluto. This 
sweet Bacchus was fond of blood, and remembered that he 

of men, made women live among themselves, closely bound and forming as a 
feminine republic (Id., Ibidem). In all this Aristophanes is a great historian. 

* Aristophanes : Lysistratus. 

\ Hippocrates, Littre's edition, iv., 367, viii., 467, etc. 



Bacch us- Sabazizis. 221 

was also Moloch. If he did not require any longer 
human victims, his thirst had not changed, so that his 
female lovers, in the rough Arcadia, lashed themselves and 
lacerated their bodies to offer him the blood of woman.* 
These impure and cruel religions spread themselves in the 
false Greece ; in Sicily, in Italy assuming a cynic character 
(as it may be seen on the vases) ; in Phrygia assuming a 
dull and foolish form ; and in Thessaly, Epirus, Thrace, 
and Macedonia, being commixed with barbarous magic. 

There was a general foreboding that great evils were 
coming, — a terrible overthrow. Women had a shrinking 
of the heart. The sorrow of Cheronea weighed over them 
beforehand. And beforehand also weighed on them the 
dreadful end of Thebes, where Alexander in one day sold 
thirty thousand Greeks into slavery. Women felt and 
feared the danger, but nevertheless they were preparing 
it. It was from the dismal orgies that those evils were to 
spring, for which they wept, without knowing them — dis- 
soluteness, ruin, slavery, and the barbarous victory, the 
living orgies, the Tyrant. 



222 Bible of Hzimanily. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE INCARNATION OF SABAZIUS — CONTINUATION — 

MILITARY ORGIES. 

\ 

The glory of the great Gelon, the good Tyrant, who 
repelled the efforts of Carthage, had perverted ideas in 
Sicily and everywhere. Among the Seven Sages there 
were two Tyrants. The Tyrant, a chief of the party op- 
posite to aristocracy, represented himself as the friend and 
benefactor of the people, their good foster-father, who 
would make them eat and drink, would be their Bacchus, 
their Ceres. To flatter him, according to these gods, the 
people often called him Dionysus (Denis) and Demetrios 
(from Demeter, Ceres). 

But no dynasty of Tyrants ever long endures. They 
spring up and fall. It was necessary, in order to create a 
stable one, to have a foundation, a fixed point out of 
Greece. It was too hateful to look for such a support 
among the Persians. Philip, the cunning king of Mace- 
donia, perceived perfectly well that the true basis of a 
dynasty of Tyrants ought to be half Greek and half bar- 
barous, and that if he could group, around his small Mace- 
donia, the rough Epirus and the wild Thrace, and espe- 
cially Thessaly — the country of Centaurs — all that pseudo- 
Greece, which was so warlike, would be in his hand a ter- 
rible weapon against the genuine, exhausted, divided 
Greece. He did two very sagacious things. He freed 
Thessaly from its tyrants, and became the patron and 
chief of its wonderful cavalry. He honored Epirus by 
taking his queen from among its people, and thus he as- 
sured to himself the valiant tribes of Albania, their firm 
foot-soldiers. This is the secret of his victory, and also of 



The Incar7iation of Sabazius. 223 

his death. He perished, because he had married a 
woman of Epirus. 

That country, the Albania of our time, of discordant 
contrast ; that country so small, and yet reckoning fourteen 
peoples, is well known. An eternal storm unceasingly 
strikes there with thunder the Ceraunii mountains. Old 
volcanoes, earthquakes, violent alluvions of torrents, these 
things make up Epirus. There were enormous fierce 
dogs, but man was far more fierce. Assassinations at all 
times were abundant. The very women there carried 
weapons ; they were stern, violent, and haunted both by 
the old spirits of the country (in the forests of Dodona), 
and by the new demons of Thrace and Phrygia. They 
were born Bacchantes and sorceresses ; skilful in the dan- 
gerous herbs of dreams, or of poison, it was their joy, in 
imitation of the Medeas of Thessaly, to wind around their 
arms and their breasts, the beautiful, undulating adders. 
They used to say that they had formerly put to flight 
whole armies only by means of their yellings and their ser- 
pents.* Vain fables. Those innocent reptiles upon them 
were rather an ornament of prostitution. It is said that 
Hercules, with loathing and horror, saw on these barbarous 
lands the beginning of the Syrian and Phrygian orgies of 
Adonis, and of Atys-Sabazius. Those haughty women, 
with their thyrsus, their dagger, and their masculine 
pride, sank in those orgies to the level of false women or 
half-men, the immodest Atys, who styled themselves 
mutilated, the merchants of unprolific amours, of dreams, 
and who were trivial soothsayers. If from the holy or- 
gies a child were born, oh, miracle ! the child was the off- 
spring of a god ! 

Handlers of serpents, inspired quacks, circle-dancers of 
Sabazius, Bacchants, and Bachantes of Bacchus, they all 
held fast together. The young woman whom Philip 
married belonged to those who played with serpents. 

* Poly^en., iv., 1. 



224 Bible of Humanity. 

She was protected by the greatest oracles, all which at 
that time were subordinated to Bacchus. Philip, perhaps, 
knew that, and thought to make it an engine of power 
in his hand. He was entrapped in his own snares. The 
name of his queen from Epirus was Myrtale ; but she, 
through unseemly ambition, called herself Olympias. 
After the marriage, she boldly told Philip that she had 
conceived on the eve, that she had had the dream of 
Semele, a flood of fire. The lightning had filled her 
bosom, and hence the whole earth. Philip little relished 
such a confidence. He had the apprehension that the 
lightning, with which she was pregnant would bring him 
ill-fortune. He was inquisitive to know why at night she 
lay alone, and, looking through a crevice, he saw near her 
a great serpent sleeping. He was disgusted at the spec- 
tacle. He perceived immediately that his queen was 
expert in the dirty rites of Sabazius.* The vast brother- 
hood, mixed with those of Cybele and Bacchus, included 
the low bottoms of prostitution, the street-walkers and the 
quacks, the sellers of love, of prayers, of remedies, of 
abortion, and of poison. 

If he had cast away this woman, he would have caused 
Epirus to revolt. He would have set against himself the 
army of Bacchants and Bacchantes. He must have be- 
lieved so, when, having consulted the oracle of Delphi, 
he was told that he must make an offering to the god who 
had honored him so much, and that he would lose but 
one eye for the impiety of having looked through a crev- 
ice into the bed-chamber of Olympias. This answer of 
the oracle spread through Greece, and caused the predic- 
tion to be fulfilled. A skilful archer undertook the task. 

The child, Alexander, whether bastard or not, grew up. 
His mother had employed every means to make people 
believe in the fable of his birth. She had her serpents 
everywhere, keeping some in vases, others in baskets, 

* See especially Movers and Lobeck. I will return to this subject by 
and by. 



The Incarnation of Sabazius, 225 

from which they darted out hissing, not without terror to 
visitors. The boy, brought up in the midst of such come- 
dies, believed himself to be the son of Bacchus-Sabazius. 
He inclined his neck on the left, in order to imitate the 
gracefulness of Bacchus, the ease of the beautiful idler, as 
he is represented in his statues. Nevertheless, since the 
name Sabazius had become too synonymous with the 
words liar and quack, people called him Zeus-Sabazius, 
and later in life Alexander attributed to himself the horns 
of Anion. 

Nobody was less Greek, nothing more opposite to the 
Grecian hero (Ulysses or Themistocles) than Alexander. 
He had the true blood of the North, was of very white 
complexion, and had another characteristic, which is 
never found in the South, namely, humid eyes {hygroteta), 
eyes with glimpses of blood-red fury or drunkenness. In 
short, he was a perfect barbarian, full of impulse, but a 
toper, a passionate man, capable of great crimes and great 
repentance. It is known that he had at times the shame- 
less adventure, not heard of before among the Greeks, of 
killing in his drunkenness a friend with his own hand. 
His countenance very probably expressed too distinctly 
his native inhumanity ; for he seems to have been afraid 
of being exhibited in portrait too resembling to himself, 
and therefore forbade, under penalty of death, that artists 
should deviate from the official model of his artist, the 
great statuary Lysippus. 

Philip forgot him, and left him entirely under his 
mother's care till he was thirteen years old. His educa- 
tion was so neglected that he did not learn even the most 
common exercises of Greece ; for instance, he could not 
swim. Philip had a son, his bastard Aridseus, a well-dis- 
posed and well-gifted young man. Olympias, however, 
secretly provided against him, by means of some bever- 
age, which turned his head. Philip then had to think to 
whom should he leave the great work of his life, his king- 
dom and the army which he had created with so much art 
10* 



226 Bible of Humanity, 

and cunning. Cool-headed as he* was, and truly superior, 
he had no repugnance toward the boy, who, whatever he 
was, seemed to be undaunted, and who by many was 
called the son of the gods. Philip adopted him, and put 
him for four years under the tuition of a client of his 
household, a man of very great genius, Aristotle ; who, 
however, was so much of a Greek, and of such a reflecting 
turn of mind, that he was precisely the most unfit to have 
any hold on that young barbarous nature. Besides, 
Aristotle had Alexander late under his tuition, when the 
latter had already been moulded by his shameless mother, 
and by her lying story that he was a god, and when the vile 
flatterers of Olympias surrounded him. But the teacher 
whom Alexander filially loved was not Aristotle ; it was 
Leonidas, Alexander's silly foster-father, who spoke only 
of Asia Minor, of India, and of the victories of Bacchus, 
which the young man was to renew. Add to all this the 
concurrence of all the oracles, which foretold even the 
least details of his future conquests. 

Philip had reached the highest eminence of renown. 
Conqueror at Cheronea, he had displayed a glorious 
moderation, declining any triumph, and sending home the 
prisoners. His great work was accomplished ; he was not 
only powerful, but beloved. Many sincere men believed 
that Greece could not, without him, carry on her mission, 
the Hellenization of the East. It was nothing to conquer it. 
It was necessary to pervade it with the Greek spirit and 
knowledge, to colonize and civilize, and to make such a 
change desirable. Nobody could do that better than 
Philip. Brought up in company with Epaminondas, he 
was possessed, if not of his virtues, at least of his patience 
and his steady mildness. He had that in which the vio- 
lent Alexander was deficient — the conception of the time, 
of the necessary compromises, without which a conquest 
would be but a scourge for the world, and create nothing 
but chaos. 

Philip was forty-six years old. Around him, at the 



The Incarnation of Sabazucs. 227 

solemn moment of his expedition, was gathering a crowd 
of eminent scientific men, precisely as the Committee of 
Egypt formed in our time by the Directory for General 
Bonaparte. The soul of it was Aristotle, who declined to 
go with Alexander, but who would have followed Philip, 
and doubtless in company of the illustrious naturalist Theo- 
phrastus. With Alexander went the school of Aristotle, 
Callisthenes his nephew, Anaxarchus, and Pyrrho his 
pupils, and many historians, Nearchus, the great mariner, 
etc. It was perfectly easy to conjecture, after the trium- 
phant return of Xenophon, and the success of Agesilaus, 
that the war against an empire already dissolving could not 
be a serious one, and that people could very easily follow 
the army, study, become perfectly acquainted with the 
country, and, above all, select the places where colonies 
should be established. The most important of them had 
been organized. A multitude of Greeks — soldiers, ma- 
rines, and merchants — filled the shores of Egypt. 

There was but one bristling point for Philip, — his bar- 
barous woman of Epirus, who tried to prevent his depart- 
ure, by arming against him the people of Epirus and her 
son, the son of Sabazius, that dangerous young man, 
fully convinced of his own divinity, and capable of doing 
anything to overthrow opposition. The mother and her 
son had on their side the temples. Philip, desirous to en- 
courage his party, consulted the oracle of Delphi, but he 
received an answer bearing a double meaning, and which 
forshadowed his death : " The sacrifice is ready, the bull 
is crowned with garlands." 

Philip went further, and took a wife, by whom he had a 
, child. This hastened the catastrophe. Olympias caused 
I him to be assassinated, and dedicated under her own 
name the dagger at Delphi. People were then enabled to 
judge what they had lost, and what the new government 
would be. Olympias took possession of her rival, with 
her child, and caused them to be burned in a brazen 
vase. Alexander, in one day, sold at auction thirty thou- 



228 Bible of Humanity. 

sand Greeks, the very Thebans who had raised Philip, 
and had made the greatness of his house. 

All obstacles were removed before the son of the gods. 
Extreme weariness, atony, and despair produce, in this 
world of ours, a disease, which may be called the Messianic 
epidemic. All the superstitious elements which were in 
Greece stood by the young god, whose inauguration had 
taken place through a massacre. People saw him with 
lightning in his hand, an army enormous indeed, and 
unheard of. All the resources of wisdom had come to- 
gether for the great, inevitable, and expected enterprise, 
which was to be accomplished by the wise, or by the fools. 
Its time had come, and the necessity was such that no 
mistake of Alexander could have made it miscarry. He 
made many queer mistakes, with impunity, which would 
have caused the ruin of another man. He fought in the 
most unfavorable places. He marched through unusual 
routes, and through deserts without water ; he risked his 
army and put it to the utmost ordeals. How was it ? 
People have not wished to understand it. But those who 
have a little experience, and the knowledge of living 
forces, easily conjecture that, beyond the miracle, there 
was some other thing than a well-trained army. There 
was, indeed, a God and a spirit, the wing of fire, and 
the breath of fire, that which I would call the soul of 
Greece, which always went straight forward ; seemed to be 
led, while it was leading ; made up for blunders, and re- 
paired them, and which was indeed the infallibility of 
victory. The historians have thrown all this into the 
shade, as much as they could. But Alexander felt it 
with vexation, when ironically he said this true thing : 
" Could it not be said that the Greeks, in the midst of the 
Macedonians, are like spirits among beasts ? " 

It was the peculiarity of Greece, that, for a hundred 
years, in the expectation of great things which were 
foreseen, there had been many men of equanimity, fit 
for all things, warriors and men of letters, philosophers, 



The Incarnation of Sabazius. 229 

soldiers of adventure. Men like Xenophon had already- 
penetrated into Asia, and acquired renown. Men like 
the undaunted, cruel Clitarchus, the sophist, made them- 
selves tyrants of a state. Such a one was the excellent 
and accomplished tyrant who gave his sister for a wife to 
Aristotle. But the absolute dominion of little common- 
wealths was not enough to satisfy them. They aimed at 
higher things, at Babylon and Persepolis. They knew, as 
a modern authority has said, that " one cannot work on a 
large scale but in the East." In those high-minded men, 
men of superior genius, there was an ambitious Greece — 
waiting till at last the barrier should be put down— that 
followed Alexander and served him too well. The same 
signal happiness, which, in the campaign of Italy, was 
the lot of Conde and Bonaparte, — everywhere taking 
and gathering around themselves many excellent officers, 
men beyond comparison, — was also the lot of the young 
Alexander, around whom gathered themselves spontane- 
ously those illustrious Greeks ; and it is especially for 
this circumstance that the young king became Alexander 
the Great. 

The Persians also had Greeks in their pay, who, how- 
ever, were riotous, dissatisfied, and not very numerous, 
although their number has been exaggerated as much as 
it could be. Nothing was neglected to deceive the world, 
and the coming generations. Many licensed historians 
went along with the army. The generals themselves 
wrote, lied, as much as they could ; yet Alexander did 
not rely on all this. That the war was by no means such 
as it has been related is evident from the fact that he had, 
through all his route, the leisure of writing, at every turn, 
to his friends or lieutenants in Greece, the news, which 
they put in everybody's mouth.* As it is known that, in 
the last century, Frederick wrote incessantly to France 
and did his best to become a Frenchman, so it is certain 

* Plutarch : Alexander, li. 93. 



230 Bible of Humanity. 

that Alexander seemed to be uneasy at not being 
altogether a Greek, and made court to the shadow of 
Athens. He carried Homer with him everywhere, and 
put him at night under his pillow. That which shows, 
nevertheless, how little he profited by Homer's poems, 
is that, quite contrary to the custom of the true Greeks, 
who all imitated Ulysses, he chose for his ideal the brutal 
hero of the country of the Centaurs, the impetuosity and 
the fury of Achilles. To imitate Achilles and the over- 
throw of Troy, he performed the horrible pillage of 
Thebes. In the most urgent moment of war, he cele- 
brated at Ilium the games and long festivals. After taking 
Gaza and the chief of the city, who had opposed him a 
long resistance, he imitated Achilles by dragging him 
behind his chariot by means of a rope and his bored feet. 

One fine morning this Achilles became Asiatic, and 
turned his back to Homer and Greece. Babylon, the 
great mistress in monarchical prostitutions, accomplished 
in one day upon Alexander those effects which it required 
a hundred years to produce on the Persians. Shameful 
and unforeseen spectacle ! The conquered found them- 
selves to be the vanquishers. Asia, that was at that 
moment worn out, stained, and in the cadaverous condition 
of Chaldean rottenness, — old Asia obtained her master 
for her lover. A gilded sepulchre, the sink of love, through 
which the world had passed, such was the passion of Alex- 
ander the Great. Modern writers, when they see in all this 
an admirable political sagacity, are insane. If the Greeks 
had to contract a little of the Asiatic manners and think- 
ing, this certainly was not the way to do it. Asiatic cus- 
toms and ideas ought to have been controlled by the lofty 
Greek spirit. It would have been necessary, above all, 
to proceed in this business with a very slow prudence, 
and with wise considerations. 

To lay hold of Asia through the child Bagoas, the 
false girls, the Good Luck, and the perversity of the 
magians ; to throw himself headlong in the pit and mud 



The Incarnation of Sabazius. 231 

of uncleanness, was to show himself a barbarian by 
nature, delighting in impurity ; it was to recall to mind 
his nativity, the son of a Bacchante, and of the charlatan 
Sabasius. His palace was crowded with soothsayers and 
charlatans. 

He relied solely on the conquered people, and blindly, 
without shame or precaution, armed them. He was train- 
ing thirty thousand Persians for fighting against the 
Greeks, or to drive them away. He wished that the 
latter, transformed in a moment, and becoming Persians, 
should worship him in the Eastern manner, abjuring their 
good sense. 

It was not, as some make us believe, a childish thing, 
and a mere vanity. It was a perverse and calculated 
thing. Adoration was the touch-stone for the abdication 
of good sense and human dignity. The magians, his 
teachers, felt that this would be the limit of Greek obedi- 
ence, and that if he were resisted, he would hate Greece, 
and become entirely a Persian. 

When at a later period the Caesars did the same things, 
the world had sunk so low, and was so much degraded, 
that anything was easy. But at the time of Alexander, in 
the presence of Greece yet alive, in that sublime light of 
genius and reason, the attempt to sink man into the con- 
dition of a beast was a mad crime, even beyond the foolish- 
ness of Caracalla. 

Strange thing ! Greek apostates were partly the cause. 
When in his drunken anger Alexander had assassinated 
Cleitus, the sophist Anaxarchus, seeing him weep, said 
to him, while making sport of him : "That nothing was 
crime in him, since he was the Law ; that Jupiter had 
Themis, who sat near him, to serve him." Such words 
sank deep in Alexander's heart. From that moment he 
caused himself to be worshipped. 

The Greeks obeyed and laughed. Only one among 
them did not laugh, and resisted. He disconcerted Alex- 
ander, and checked him by the sacrifice of his own life. 



232 Bible of Httmanity. 

His name will never die. It was Callisthenes, the philoso- 
pher, and nephew of Aristotle. 

Ptolemaeus, later a king of Egypt, a captain and friend 
of Alexander, his most serious and reliable historian, 
positively says that Callisthenes was crucified by order of 
Alexander, because he would not worship him.* 

Enormous event. Plutarch, who had read Ptolemaeus 
and all the contemporaneous historians whom we have 
lost, says that Alexander did flinch ; that Callisthenes lost 
his life, but saved Greece from that extreme degree of 
shame. 

I have no doubt about it. This solemn action was of 
an immense importance. What the deep thought of 
Aristotle had just founded in the intellectual domain, by 
creating in theory the philosophy of energy, his nephew 
carried out in practical life, and from the height of his 
cross he, more than Zeno, more than Cleanthes, originated 
stoicism. 

Rich and fruitful work, which was not only the struggle, 
the heroic defence of the soul and of conscience, of human 
reason crushed under the gods, but which was soon to 
become the strong foundation of what the ancient world 
has bequeathed to us of its best, — civil law and jurispru- 
dence, which in the main points we still follow. 

Wisdom is sedate. I will not describe foolishness. 
The new Bacchus pushed on to India. With what real 
result ? Is it really the genius of Greece which con- 
quered its way, and penetrated into remoter Asia ? Is the 
bloody chaos which we soon shall point out, the ephem 
eral Greek empire, a foundation? Asia despised it, and 
was filled with disgust by it, and returned eagerly to her 

* Plutarch, who relates this fact, has under his eyes Ptolemaeus, a high 
authority, and the first of all authorities. Arrian, whom alone Montesquieu 
follows, is the worst historian of Alexander. Arrian, many centuries after 
Alexander, falsified Alexander's history, trying to put in it some good sense. 
It is necessary to leave it as it really is, an absurd, romantic, foolish narra- 
tive. 



The Incarnation of Sabazius. 233 

ancient religion, a fanatic reaction, which soon created the 
empire of the Parthians. 

The army, wiser than its commander, at last refused to 
go further, and behold, this powerful god was compelled to 
obey. The scenes which were exhibited on the return 
were extraordinary for madness and despair. Alexander 
had lost his senses, and was scarcely a man. He built a 
city in honor of his dog ; another for the tomb of his 
horse. lie played Bacchus, carrying the thyrsus, and 
crowned all his army with ivy, making Bacchantes of all 
those sunburnt old soldiers. From the height of his world- 
wide imperial throne, he taught and exemplified that 
which the kings of Asia hid in their seraglios. He was 
already an Heliogabalus, with all the infamies of Atys, 
and of Adonis of double sex, " the lover of Venus, and 
the fair beloved of Apollo." He wept over Hephaestion 
with the passion of a woman ; he killed his physicians, 
burned the temple of Esculapius, and asked the oracle of 
Anion to make a demigod of the dead Hephaestion. The 
love-feast in honor of the child Bagoas, displayed before 
the army, was more astonishing still — an unique scene 
which is not to be found in the history of the Caesars. 
This example in such a man as Alexander the Great car- 
ried with it a fatality. The burden, with the weight of 
his glory and his immense influence, was destined to lie 
heavy on the future. The Caesars were its product, and 
it created the military customs of armies, the morals of 
soldiers and of kings. 

The army of Alexander clapped hands at the strange and 
monstrous sight, at first in mockery — and then in the wild 
joy of feeling the restrictions upon them loosened in the 
outrageous libertinism of the exhibition, and the carnival 
which lasted so long. All had been emancipated for all 
the filth of war. A spurious, unbridled Greece, formed 
from every people, will plunder the world. Every one 
through infamy will be Bacchus-Sabazius ; every one, 
in his own sphere, will be an Alexander the Great. 



234 Bible of Humanity, 

His heritage was a vast one. It consisted of three things : 

First. He killed hope, and human dignity. Every one 
felt himself a plaything of destiny, who had encountered 
enormous, unforeseen, casual forces, and despairing of 
himself, became weak and credulous. Everywhere there 
were tears, everywhere hands were lifted up to the sky. 
There was an immense commerce of slaves ; merchants 
followed the soldiers. Those unhappy masses of Syria, 
of Phrygia, and even of the upper East, brutalized 
Europe with their Messianic foolishness. 

Second. Alexander killed human reason. The wonder- 
ful fact of his expedition made everything credible and 
acceptable. People did not remember any longer that 
Xenophon with ten thousand men, and that Agesilaus with 
six thousand, had crushed all the efforts of the Persians. 
People did not remember any longer that the miracle of 
Alexander had been set in order and prepared through a 
concurrence of the events of two hundred years. People 
were stupefied, and sadly bowing their head before every- 
thing which was absurd, foolish, chimerical, and which 
until that time they would have laughed at, they used to 
say : " Why not ? It is less than Alexander the Great." 
Intelligent men, as Pyrrho, became altogether sceptical. 
He had followed Alexander, he had seen the fact, and he 
could not believe in it ; it appeared to him to be a dream, 
and from that time everything seemed to him to be un- 
certain. The majority of mankind, on the contrary, sank 
into the silly belief of monstrous fables. Euhemerus 
flatly asserted that every god had been a king ; and the 
majority of men more flatly believed that every king was 
a god. 

"Why could not a divine serpent have chosen, for his 
Leda, Alexander's mother ? . . . Mystery ! deep mys- 
tery ! . . . Silly human reason, hold your peace ! Un- 
doubtedly men like Socrates had not foreseen it ! What 
of that ? Alexander can do without it. Suffice it that his 
miracles have proved his divinity." 



The Incarnation of Sabazius. 235 

Henceforth many kings are gods, and sons of gods. 
The pattern lias been laid down. Any one can copy it. 
Augustus' mother will tell you that she has enjoyed the 
favors of the serpent, and that the slimy reptile has im- 
planted the Caesars in her womb. 

Third. Imitation is the law of this world of ours. Osiris 
was imitated by Sesostris in his conquests; Semiramis, 
with few slight differences, imitated the latter. Bacchus, 
in his war in India, in his conquest of the earth, copied 
this old nonsense of the East ; so did also Bacchus- Alex- 
ander, who has, in his turn, been imitated by the Cajsars, 
Charlemagne, Loui> XIV., etc. 

But, more than any other man, Alexander has been the 
founder of all monarchical folly, not only on account of the 
unmeasurable influence oi his glory, but because from 
him began in our Europe the royal machinery , preserved 
and servilely imitated. The conception of the modern 
king, the court, and the etiquette have come to us taken 
precisely from him. 

The ancient king of the East, the patriarch or sacerdotal 
king, had the unction and sceptre of a priest, rather than 
the sword. The Grecian tyrant was a popular chief, who 
had the sword, the might. These two kinds of authority 
were, for the first time, united in Alexander.* From 
that time the double tyranny in one man has lain, and 
will lie heavy upon mankind. For the modern king, in 
Christian times, while he carries the sword, has also the 
cope, the priestly character. f 

It was by this that the magians so easily laid hold of 
Alexander. His triumphal entrance into Babylon was a 
curious one, as a political apotheosis, a deification of 
royalty. 

Through a road strewn with flowers, between two long 

* This idea, which is the animus of M. Michelet's work, is not accurate. 
In India and other countries, ages before Alexander, military leaders had 
usurped supreme power, and made the priests their subordinates. — Ed. 

f See my History. 



2 $6 Bible of Humanity, 

rows of silver altars, on which perfumes were burning, all 
of great Babylon, — with her riches and pleasures, with her 
sciences and arts, with her music, with her astronomers, 
women and lions, tame leopards, with her pretty, rouged 
boys, the minions of Mylitta, — came to prostrate herself 
before Alexander. He was so dazzled by, and so intoxi- 
cated with, this pomp, that his masters and corrupters made 
of him what they desired. They made him accept the ma- 
gians' purifications (so impure !). They made him accept 
their solemn puerilities, and appointed for him a seraglio 
of three hundred and sixty-five women, according to the 
number of the days in the year.* They muffled him up in 
the cidarim^ the diadem (of Mithras and Bacchus) anointed 
with myrrh, which makes gods out of kings. They thrust 
upon him a golden house, a golden throne, a golden scep- 
tre, all the old royal curiosities, with the comedies of the 
eagle, of eagle-lion, the griffin, which things the Caesars 
later put on their standards, and feudalism adopted into its 
beautiful heraldic mysteries. Moreover they made him 
accept a wearisome etiquette of seven tasters, of seven 
nobles devoted to his person — the seven planets of the 
royal sun, a haired sun ; he must wear long hair. From 
this we perceive whence were derived our Roman-heads 
of false hair, and the periwig of our King-sun. 

* See Diodorus, Plutarch, and the texts which have been collected by 
Hyde in his book De Regno Persarum. 

f From the Hebrew -\T\2, KiTaR, a diadem. The term is found in the 
following passages: Esther i. n; ii. 17; and vi. 8. According to the 
Talmudy the tzanich, turban or mitre, of the Jewish high priest, was called 
kitar or cidaris. — Ed. 



The Jew — The Servant. 237 



^>> 



CHAPTER V. 

THE JEW — THE SERVANT. 

A TRAVELLER is arrested in his journey, about evening 
in a barren region, by an overflowing torrent. There is 
in the midst an old bridge, but it is broken on each side. 
There are still two arches standing, and two or three piers, 
but they are inaccessible. At what time was that struct- 
ure built ? It would cost much labor and trouble to ascer- 
tain. One cannot even determine its very height. The 
unapproachable ruin, covered with wild shrubs, looks 
grandly solemn. Indeed, if the shades of night fell around 
us, that phantom would become larger, and would almost 
frighten us out of our senses. 

The effect produced by the Jewish Bible, for a long 
period of time, has been similar to that of an isolated ruin 
seen from a distance. People reasoned about it at random, 
having neither the true perspective to examine it, nor the 
means of studying the approaches of such a monument, 
namely, the neighboring or kindred peoples who were in- 
termingled with the Jews ; the great empires to which they 
were transplanted, and where they lived. While all this 
was wanting, Judea, considered alone, deceived the eyes. 
She filled up all the horizon, nay, she concealed the 
world with her phantasmagoria of religious illusions, with 
the prismatic colors, or gloomy clouds of her allegorical 
mysticism. 

. Our century did not remain an immovable contemplator 
of the mysterious monument. It neither worshipped nor 
demolished it, but completed it by rebuilding on each side 
the piers and the arches overthrown. The great ruin in 
the midst is no longer isolated. By that alone everything 
has been changed. There is no longer any phantasma- 



238 Bible of Humanity. 

goria. One can now approach, view, touch, and measure 
it. From one bank to the other, taking in all the landscape, 
one sees, clear of the mist, the colossuses of Egypt and 
of Persia, the two masters and teachers of Judea.* Near 
her and round about her one sees her kinsmen, namely, 
the people of Syria, Phoenicia, and Carthage. From 
these comes the great ray of light. It was believed that 
those peoples had altogether disappeared. Alexander 
having overthrown Tyre, and Scipio Carthage, Judea re- 
mained the heiress and representative of all that was 
destroyed. 

It is true that there never was such a terrible ruin. The 
remains, the fragments, the wrecks, broken over again 
and again, are moreover scattered on every side. A 
wonderful patience alone could recover them. Such a 
pursuit, though difficult, has however been accomplished. 
Men like Bochart and Selden, Munter and Movers have 
obstinately sought after, gathered up, and collected what 
they could on those peoples. They have recovered thou- 
sands of instructive texts on Carthage, which city had 
been so completely overthrown. The collected texts re- 
lating to the gods, manners, commerce, and genius of the 
Phoenicians are far more numerous. The Phoenicians 
were evidently identical with the Canaanites, an indigen- 
ous population of Judea, which population had lived 
always there among the Jews, and differed very little from 
them in customs and habits, f 

* Despite the Hebrew traditions of a sojourn in Egypt, and the greater 
probability that the Jews descended from the Hyk-sos fugitives into Palestine, 
it is noteworthy that only the name of their reputed leader {Moses, a child), 
and the father of Joshua {Nun, a fish, or celibate woman), appear as the 
name of any Israelite in the Old Testament. See Inman : Ancient Faiths 
Embodied in Ancient Names, i., pp. 96, 97, 135; ii., 99, et passim. — Ed. 

f Indeed it is hardly possible to discriminate, when we consider that the 
same language and religion characterized the two peoples, and that they inter- 
married. " The children of Israel dwelt among the Canaanites, Hittites, 
and Amorites, and Perizzites, and Hivites, and Jebusites ; and they took their 
daughters to be their wives, and gave their daughters to their sons, and served 






The Jew — TJie Servant. 239 

How could Judea have been able to insulate herself 
entirely ? The country was truly nothing but a narrow 
strip of hills, bounded on the East by the river Jordan, 
on the West by the coast, the ports of the Philistines and 
Phoenicians. Her utmost width is fifteen leagues.* On 
the coast there were the large cities of the Philistines, 
Gaza, Azor, Ascalon ; and then the wealthy ports of the 
Phoenicians, Sidon, Tyre, etc. An exuberant population 
existed altogether towards the sea, that many a time 
seized upon the mournful country of the mountains, but 
more often despised it. 

Judea, on the east of the river Jordan, possessed, outside 
of herself, several tribes or commonwealths, who found in 
the low valleys a little pasture-land ; but the heights were 
and are dreadful, and dark with lugubrious basalt. 

their gods." — Judges iii. 5, 6. The amalgamation appears to have been 
very complete according to the Bible record. 

"I do not myself," says Prof. J. P. Lesley, "believe, with entire confi- 
dence, in the personal existence of the Jewish patriarchs. For you will find 
in the old Hindoo mythologies the names of Abraham, Isaac, and Judah, 
ranged in a similar order and connection. Brahma's son, Ikswaka, was the 
great-grandfather of Vadoo. The Hebrews of Palestine were but a single 
twig of that wide-spreading branch of the Shemitic tree, which had its original 
seats in Central Asia, and migrating southward and westward over Persia, 
Mesopotamia, Arabia, and Syria, entered Egypt under the name of Hyk-sos. 
.... Judging the Mosaic story from these canons, in which all agree, 
we find it of an age ante-dating all precise history ; we find it utterly unsup- 
ported by contemporary monumental records; and we feel it to be a splendid 
series of incredibilities from first to last. His birth, his miracles, his Exodus, 
his converse with Jehovah, and his mysterious disappearance, — all stamp the 
history with an indelible character of myth, which not a single discovery of 
any branch of science has yet repaid the endeavor to efface. In less degree — 
in a far less degree — but still in essentially the same mode, the legends of 
the Jews of a date previous to the reign of Solomon, are utterly unhistorical ; 
although the stories of the Judges are probable enough. Nothing prevents 
us from identifying the Hebrews of the Monarchy as descendants of the Hyk- 
sos race, nor from supposing that the Mosaic Records were inventions of a 
later age, based on a mixture of Hyk-sos traditions, Arabian poetry, Zoroas- 
tnan mythology, and genuine Egyptian and monumental history. " —Man's 
Origin and Destiny, pp. 144, 153. — Ed. 

* HlERONYMUS, ad Bar d. 85. — Munk, Palestine, p. 40. 



240 Bible of Humanity. 

Strabo rightly says that Judea is, on the whole, a very 
poor country. There is, however, some variation from it ; 
vineyards, which are supported by terraces, are cultivated 
there, and also some patches of wheat in the many oases, 
which are naturally formed by the river Jordan and several 
brooks. In every epoch, however, the travellers, whose 
word may be believed, say that, on entering that country, 
one feels something like a great dryness and an infinite 
ennui. With the exception of the small circle of Galilee 
and the land of Naplous, everything is gloomy and mo- 
notonous, dull and gray with ashes. 

Good sense evidently shows that there must have been 
very strong reasons for preferring this country to the rich 
Damascene Syria, to the fertile region of the giants, to 
the bewitching Ascalon, the betrothed of Syria, to Tyre 
and Sidon, the queens of the seas. 

Judea seemed to offer two asylums, two natural shelters, 
in the two central points of her two kingdoms of Israel 
and Judah. On the north, the closed valley of Samaria 
is protected on each side. On the south, Jerusalem, which 
stands on a very high commanding point, can be ap- 
proached only through two passes easily defended, namely, 
the valley of Jehoshaphat and that of Terebinth. 

The Jew invited and hospitably admitted the stranger, 
promising to render him impartial justice ;* pledging to 
him an equal share of land as if he were a Jew ; f agree- 
ing with him to admit him to his own festivals and ban- 
quets ; J nay, even to his prayers. § The stranger shall be 
in Judea as though he were in his own country ; the Jew 
loves him as he does himself. \ 

That is going too far. But who is this stranger ? He 
may be a fugitive entering Judea without clothing, or 
any means of subsistence. " God loves him, and will 
give him an inheritance among his own chosen people.'" 

* Deuteronomy i. 16, 24. \ Ezekiel xlvii. 22. 

\ Deuteronomy xvi. 11, 14. § III. (I) Kings viii. 41. 

|] Leviticus xix. 34. 



The yew — The Servant. 241 

A little farther one sees more clearly into this secret. 
The stranger may be a slave. " The slave who takes 
shelter among you shall not be given back to his master. 
He will dwell where he wishes, and shall find rest and 
security in your cities, and nobody shall make him 
uneasy."* 

After this, we know what will happen. Under these 
conditions, the most gloomy, the most barren country, 
will never be a desert. Such policy, which wishes to pro- 
cure inhabitants at any price, is all the more remarkable, 
because it is found among an economical, and even greedy 
people, as it may be seen in the books of Kings and in 
that of Jere/niah, etc. The Jews are altogether unac- 
quainted with the chivalrous feelings of the Arabians,! an d 
still more with the generous, though often imprudent 
grandeur of the Indo-Celtic races, which burst out in 
their poetry from the R&mayana to the Shah Xameh, from 
the Niebelungen to the French songs of Roland and of Mer- 
lin. 

The Jew, from the beginning, has been a peace-loving 
man, a man of business. I lis ideal is neither the warrior, 
nor the workingman, nor the husbandman. Formerly a 
nomad, a shepherd, he returned later to his wandering 
life, as a pedler, as a banker, or as a broker. 

The Bible strongly and simply lays down such an ideal. 
It is Jacob, who constituted the type and exemplar, who 
received the sacred name of the people, Israel. Jacob 
was a pacific man, "who remained at home, ,} while his 
brother Esau, the Idumean, worked, or went hunting. 
Esau, entirely hairy, had a skin like that of a beast ; 
Jacob had no hair at all. Jacob a shepherd, like Abel, 
was blessed. Esau, a laborer like Cain, was condemned 
and disinherited. 

* Deuteronomy xxiii. 15, 16. 

f If David did not kill Saul, at the time he could have done it, it was not 
on account of chivalric feeling, but because the king was the anointed of the 
Lord. 

II 



242 Bible of Humanity. 

Art and industry, as well as agriculture, are condemned 
in the personification of Tubal-cain. The builders are dis- 
paraged, mocked at, and the tower of Babel is mentioned 
as the great work which they were able to perform. The 
true Jew, the patriarch, is the artful shepherd, who knows 
how to increase his flock by an intelligent care of acquisi- 
tion and calculating. He is pleasing to woman, his mother 
Rebecca, and he seems a very woman himself, very pru- 
dent in his submissions and adorations to his brother 
Esau, whom he had so dexterously wheedled out of his 
birth-right. 

The beloved son of Jacob is the slave, who became a 
vizier. It is Joseph, the financier, who from being at 
first a soothsayer, rose to power by interpreting dreams.* 
Such a story would have been impossible in Egypt, where 
the shepherd, Hyk-sos, being considered as an impure 
man, would have found every entrance closed to employ- 
ments and honors, f but which is very natural in Chaldea, 
where such men as Tobias, Mardocheus, and Daniel were 
soothsayers, viziers, and treasurers. 

The great and true glory of the Jews, which they owe 
to their own miseries, is that they alone, among all the 
peoples, have given utterance, in a piercing and eternal 
voice, to the sigh of the slave. 

Elsewhere it was a cry, hardly uttered and constrained.^ 
In Judea, admirable and profound songs of grief were 
sung during many centuries. Those songs were so ex- 
quisite that men are satisfied to borrow them to express 

* Genesis xl., xli. and xliv., 5, 15. 

f It has been conjectured, however, that the king who made Joseph his 
vizier, was himself of the hated race, which might account for his partiality. 
The Egyptians detested all foreigners, perhaps from the memory of the Hyk- 
sos, who are described as Arabians, Phoenicians, Hellenes or Greeks, and 
Shepherds. — Ed. 

% Virgil has scarcely dared to utter the sigh of the Italian soul, of the un- 
fortunate Tityrus, who had become the slave of the soldier. In our age the 
Poles have raised their voice for a moment in a sublime despair : Krasinski, 
Mickiewicz, are equal to Isaiah. 



The Jezu — The Servant. 243 

their most sincere sorrows, and personal chagrins. It is 
because the Jews had endured misfortune in its ful- 
ness, and under its harshest forms. At first wandering 
shepherds, then carried off into Egypt and becoming 
working-men in spite of themselves, they were employed 
to build up the Pyramids.* In Palestine they were hus- 
bandmen against their will. The so-called Mosaic laws 
show prodigious efforts made to induce them to devote 
themselves to the tillage of the soil. Agricultural and 
rural festivals were organized, but the Jews remained none 
the less restless and nomadic in their mind. 

The miserable slave, who is essentially a hater of light, 
welcomes night as the hour of liberty. The Psalms and 
the chants of the prophets are, most of them, night- 
songs. 

He has worked at his vineyard. Night falls, and by 
and by all is wrapped in darkness. Stretched on his 
terrace, under a sparkling sky, he sleeps a few moments, 
and then awakes. The lions, which arc in his heart, bound 
... It is a loud roaring. But before long the tears come: 
Ah ! Ah ! Ah ! Lord, my God. 

But God hears not. The sufferer cries out, invokes 
him all the more: "Arise. . . Do you sleep, O Lord ? 
Do you wait until I die ? . . . The dead will not praise 
thee. . ." 

That which is original and extremely touching in these 
long alternatives is that, among his aridities, languors, 
and the delays of God in hearing him, the Jew reproaches 
himself alone. He strikes his own breast. Seated under 



* It is hardly probable that the Hyk-sos or Hebrews worked on the Pyra- 
mids. Hengstenberg, quoted by Lesley, states that Ramases II., or Sesostris, 
to guard his frontiers against the Hittites of Palestii e, forced his native 
Hyk-sos serfs and foreign military slaves to build a chain of forts across the 
Isthmus of Suez, of which the principal were Ramases and Pithom. These 
conscripts were called Apura, conj. Hebrews, as both words mean over-men 
or emigrants. This king worshipped the sun-god Aten or Satan, whom the 
Jews afterward made the Enemy of Jehovah and Prince of Devils. — Ed. 



244 Bible of Humanity, 

the juniper tree, he says : " Take me to you, O Lord ! . . . 
I am no better than my fathers were." 

How different is this, not only from the indomitable 
Arabian of Hedjaz (Antar), but from that of Idumea, the 
nobly disputant Job, in his controversy with God. In 
his violent poem it is perceived that Job, being over- 
whelmed at last, holds his peace and speaks not, but 
does not consider himself vanquished. God, with dinning 
noise speaks to him of the Leviathan, of thunder, etc. 
Such arguments of the strongest against a feeble being are 
no arguments at all. Job keeps his own thoughts to him- 
self : " Thou art strong, but I am just."* 

* The story of Job is dramatic in a high degree, and illustrates the bold 
self-reliance of the Arabian Emir or Sheik, such as Job is represented. He 
acted as the Hebrew zachans or patriarchs. In his controversy with his three 
friends, Job had asserted that his champion or next of kin would deliver him 
and stand up in his behalf ; and even now, though he was black and putrid 
with disease, he would yet see God, and judgment would overtake those who 
now condemned him (xix., 21-29). * n tne l atter P art of the poem, Job and 
the Deity are brought into conference, and the steadfast chieftain "holds fast 
his integrity," as he had declared that he would (xlii., 1-6). 
" Then Job answered the Lord, and said : 
' I know that thou canst do all things, 
And that thy decrees no one can resist. 
How should I disapprove of thine inscrutable wisdom ? 
I have been speaking of what I did not understand ; 
Things too marvellous, that I did not comprehend. 
Hear me, I beseech — I will speak : 
Let me ask questions and explain them to me, 
— I heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, 
But now mine eye hath seen thee — 
Wherefore do I abhor myself, 
And turn myself about in dust and ashes ? ' 
" Then Jehovah said unto Job : 

1 Let him who disputes with the Almighty stand to it ; 
He who censures God let him awe him.' 
" Then Job replied to Jehovah and said : 

' Behold, I am a poor creature, what shall I answer ? 
I will lay my hand upon my mouth. ' " 

The discussion ended by the vindication of the patriarch, the Lord himself 
taking the part of his champion. — Ed. 



The Jew — The Servant. 245 

The thoughts of the Jew are quite different. He en- 
joys not the expansion of the wilderness as does the free 
Arabian, who breathes at his leisure and whose life is 
high and proud, things of which Job bears witness to 
himself. The greatest misery of the slave is that he per- 
ceives that he wallows in those vices, which slavery in- 
volves with it, and that his will grows corrupt in them. 
Thus, there is neither mildness nor innocence in his 
lamentations. They are not like the song of the nightin- 
gale, but one may hear in them the inauspicious cries of 
some night-bird, or the bewailing of a heart, which in 
its prostration still feels itself impure. But pride has 
had the best of it. " God will be my justice ! God does 
not impute my transgressions to me. Blessed be he 
until the break of day, and from morning to evening." 

Meanwhile the darkness is becoming clear. A black 
carob-tree appears on the horizon under a luminous gray 
sky. The day is near. "If tears flow from my eyes in 
the evening, gladness will come in the morning." 

It is daylight at last. The Dead Sea sparkles ! . . . 
And the red image of the sun, even before he goes beyond 
the barren summit of the gloomy hills, stains with blood 
the dismal waves. . . . Thus the Liberator, the cham- 
pion, Iao or Jehovah is near coming ! Such a conception 
of an avenging, destroying God, is the intense passion of 
the slave. He broods over it ; and it is his precious 
treasure. The undefined Iao of Chaldea, who, according 
to MOVERS, was only a breath of life ; the gloomy Iao of 
Phoenicia, who was a voice of death, a voice of sorrow, in 
Judea is the soul of the desert. Look toward the South. 
Everything ends there ; life ceases there ; no visible form- 
neither of animals, nor of vegetables. As a compensation 
of all this, a burning breath (which recalls the Egyptian 
Typhon), an invisible power makes itself felt. One sees 
nothing, and yet one cannot face it. This invisible power 
said to Moses: "If thou dost see me, let it be at the 
back. . . . Otherwise thou art a dead man." 



246 Bible of Humanity. 

The Jews incessantly leave this terrible, savage God, 
and always return to him. "Is this a wonder? a mir- 
acle ? " Not at all. This God, notwithstanding his irk- 
some laws, is, however, the Jewish liberty, the liberty of 
hating, and cursing the gods of powerful peoples. In 
order to understand this passion for such a repulsive deity, 
the faithful and obstinate returns to him, it is necessary to 
consider that the Jews, over whom the torrent of Asia 
passed again and again, were the playthings and the vic- 
tims of all those other gods. The Midianites, with their 
black god, encamped, like devouring locusts, among the 
Jews, and ate up everything. The giants, as the Philis- 
tines were called by the Jews,* made them bondmen of 
their goddess Astarte, of her outrageous orgies, in which 
even Samson and David figured as actors, f Nor is this 
all, but in the middle of Judea, door by door, the old 
tribes of Canaan remained as a perpetual temptation to 
the Jews, whom the Canaanites united with in the lasciv- 
ious dances of the Heifer or of the Calf. 

This was a worship of deep enervation. The serf, 
allured into it at night, found himself on the morrow 
worn out and more a slave than before. Then he would 
return with shame and pious zeal to his male God, to his 
austere Jehovah, who alone was to him a wall, an invisible 
wall of fire against the sweet pressure of those deities of 
death, that surrounded him on every side. 

All this remained obscure, until, in the last century, 
Astruc, a keen critic, threw a glimpse of genius on the 
Bible. He saw the duality, the struggle of the Jewish 
soul. In the Bible, which had been always considered 

* Raphaim, a designation of the aboriginal races east of the Jordan, and of 
the country of Palestine. It must relate to other peculiarities than a colossal 
body, for one of the archangels, or Amshaspands, was styled Rapha-el. 

f The Hebrew word does not bear this out. Samson " made sport " in the 
Temple of Dagon, the Keto or Hoa of Asia ; and David, though he estab- 
lished the worship of Iao in Palestine, as the national divinity, nowhere is 
mentioned as taking part in the worship of the Syrian goddess. But his 
grandchildren did. — Ed. 



The Jew — The Servant. 247 

a simple book, he saw two Bibles ; and his view has 
since been adopted by all critics. Two religions — two dif- 
ferent worships, exhibit themselves side by side in the 
Bible. The agricultural religion of Elohe, or of the 
ELOHIM, was practiced by the majority, and easily mixed 
itself with the Cananean worship of the Heifer or the 
Calf. An austere minority,* out of hatred for the oppres- 
sive idol, made efforts to be faithful to the invisible Jeho- 
vah, the ark and adytum of whose temple, however, was 
decorated with the awkward figures of terror — two cher- 
ubs on winged bulls. This God, who in the most extreme 
misfortunes, or in panics, was very easily taken for the iron 
bull (Moloch), remained none the less the soul of the proud 
purity which upheld and saved the people, giving them 
unity. + 

The prophets of Judea are true martyrs, tortured by the 
contrasts of a violent situation. They are the popular 
representatives of the true Jewish spirit against the kings, 
who were too Syrian. The prophets struggle likewise 
against the people, against the barbarous tendencies of 
the two worships of Elohim and Jehovah, which divide 
them. The great concern of the prophets, between these 
two opposite gods, is to purify the first, to separate him 
from the orgies — the fanaticism of the nocturnal worship 
of Baal — and to humanize the second, to thrust aside from 

* It is evident that the worship of the Elohim or Cabeinan deities *vas 
maintained among the plebs of Palestine, who were a non-Shemitic peasantry, 
while the religion of Iao or Jehovah was adhered to by the aristocratic. — Ed. 

f Nations, without coming to an understanding, were advancing toward 
the idea of the Unity of God. From the year iooo B.C. to the year 500 B.C. 
this unity was manifested everywhere and in the same manner, a negative and 
destructive one, through the eclipse and the death of the gods. The Greek 
Olympus, in its high sphere, pale and withered, spiritualized itself, and became 
the Nous of Anaxagoras, or from below was blended and mixed in the impure 
vat of Bacchus. The great struggle ceased in Persia. Ahriman, enervated, 
inclined to be absorbed by Ormuzd. All the Baals of Babylon were buried in 
the bosom of Anahid or Mylitta. Those of Syria, as a judgment, appear to 
have been burned in Jehovah. The impure unity belonged to Babel. In 
Judea there was the unity of hatred. 



248 Bible of Humanity. 

his worship the brazier of Moloch. In doing this the 
prophets are noble, the true benefactors of mankind, ven- 
erable guardians of the people against those worships, 
which they repelled in a desperate struggle, often by the 
sacrifice of their own life. 

" Sons of my barn-floor and of my mill-stone ! It is you 
whom I have crushed, that are my sons ! " 

This sublime sentence of Isaiah, which sums up the 
prophets, has produced strange consequences. The 
heavy, redoubled blows, the shower of griefs and out- 
rages, have neither tired out, nor broken down the sur- 
prising elasticity of the Eternal Patient. Beaten down, 
he rises up again. Disappeared, he is found again. 
Against the cruel, very real and very certain present, he 
considers chimera and the impossible as a more certain 
blessing. 

He hopes against hope, and the more the storm increases, 
the more he thinks that the hand of God is near to show 
itself. He would groan to be saved by his own foresight. 
He longs for the hazard of Grace ; he wishes to be saved 
by a throw of the dice. These tendencies, depending on 
chance, deeply corrupt the judgment of the slave, make 
him hate Reason and despair of action. 

It was the expectation of the Messiah which troubled 
and tortured the Jewish people from their remotest anti- 
quity. This is admirably shown in the book of the 
Judges. Each of the seven captivities ended through a 
miracle, the hazard against Wisdom. The very proud as 
well as very humble principle of this curious history, is 
that the people of God, a perpetual miracle, must have a 
constantly extraordinary fate, beyond any human fore- 
sight. 

God, in order that he might manifest his glory, singled 
out, in the midst of the chosen people, the tveak rather 
than the strong, the little rather than the great, the 
younger against the elder. He preferred Joseph to the 
haughty Judah ; Jacob, cunning and mild like a woman, 



The Jew — The Servant. 249 

to the valiant Ishmael and the strong Esau. The little 
David, through God, kills the giant Goliath. In the same 
manner, God loved and chose for himself, and adopted a 
small people, the only one chosen. The other families of 
mankind were cut away. 

We must follow the ulterior consequence of this prin- 
ciple. God loves and willingly singles out the smallest in 
merit, he who is of but little worth, who wishes nothing, 
and does nothing. He says, and incessantly repeats, that 
the chosen people are worthless. He chooses the idler 
Abel in preference of the worker Cain. Abel, who makes 
no effort, who brings no merit which requires a reward, 
and so compels the hand of God, pleases him, and is 
blessed by him. 

But what follows is stronger still. He, who not only 
has no merit, but has dishonored and outraged the divine 
law, and who cannot be chosen and blessed, except 
through an astonishing miracle of mercy and goodness, 
will be precisely the very man who will glorify most the 
free power of God. He is chosen rather than the just 
man. Jacob, who cheats his brother, and deceives his 
own father, is eJioscn. Levi, cursed by Jacob for treason 
and murder, is the father of the sacerdotal tribe. Judah, 
who sold Joseph, and who shamelessly bought the impure 
embraces of Tamar,* Judah is the chief of the people, who 
are called by his name. 

Is all this a positive preference for evil and sin ? Not at 
all. It is a system, a strict application of a principle, 
according to which, he who owes nothing to God, if he be 
chosen, exhibits all the more gloriously the gratuitous 
mercy, the omnipotence of God. 

Some will say: "Are not the Jews a people under a 
law which requires Justice ? " Yes, but this very Law, 

* Genesis xxxviii., lt When Judah saw her, he took her to be a priestess 
(Hebrew Kadesha, a consecrated woman) because she had covered her face." 
A woman of this class was considered holy and pure, and not as a prostitute. 
—Ed. 



250 Bible of Humanity, 

given exclusively to a favorite people, to a people 
whom Moses himself declared worthless, this Law is es- 
tablished on a basis foreign to Justice — a basis of unjust 
preference. 

The Law itself, loaded and overloaded with minute or- 
dinances, and with an immense formalism foreign to con- 
science, tends to lull the latter asleep. So much the more 
so, that, in performing those rites and all those vain pre- 
scriptions, one feels himself to be dispensed from doing 
right. The ground of the Jew is this : "lam the happy 
one, whose Justice is God himself." Why? "I am of 
the chosen people ', the son of the divine favor." 

But, after all, why chosen ? Through what merit have 
Abraham and Jacob deserved that God should make with 
them an eternal covenant? Without any merit. They 
pleased God. 

Thus this Jewish antiquity gives already the theory of 
Grace in all its nudity. And the Jewish history close by 
shows the natural result of that theory, the repeated sins 
and relapses, vainly lamented, and, in the midst of those 
tears, the secret assurance of this proud doctrine, which is 
summed up in this : " Any transgression will be forgiven 
me ; I am the son of the house." 

Let Moses speak gruffly ; let Isaiah beat them with his 
thunderbolts ! All these manly appearances will not pre- 
vent this doctrine from being the doctrine of passion, of 
the feminine fancy— of the caprice of woman, who wishes 
to give no other reason for her love but love ; who by 
choosing the worthless thinks herself to be a queen, and 
who says: "As thou art nothing, thou shalt glorify so 
much the more my favor, my goodness, my grace." 

Such a theory is the desolating of the just, the discour- 
aging of endeavor — is the shutting of the door for ever 
to a great will. 

God's justice, they say, exceeds all our acts of justice, 
all the little ideas that the heart of man has about what is 
just. Then God can punish the innocent. When he pun- 



The Jew — The Servant. 251 

ishes the guilty, he is compelled to do it ; he cannot do 
otherwise. But when he crushes the innocent, the inno- 
cent son of the guilt)', oh ! how great then he is! how 
much more of a God then he is ! 

It was only at the time of the Captivity, when such ter- 
rible events shook all existence, every idea, and all the old 
groundwork, that two prisoners, two prophets, Jeremiah 
and Ezekiel, rooting out from their bleeding hearts those 
detestable principles, with a great and noble effort pro- 
claimed at last the Right. 

The unfortunate Jeremiah, who had given the Jews a 
very reasonable advice, but whom the Jews called a 
traitor, when he was enfranchised by the general of the 
king of Babylon, availed himself of his liberty only to go 
back to Jerusalem, and to weep upon her stones. It was 
there that he had this beautiful thought, this anti-Jewish, 
anti-Mosaic idea, above the ancient Law. "The Lord 
says : I have destroyed, but I will rebuild. They will then 
no longer say : Our fathers ate the sour grapes, and our 
teeth are set on edge. Each man will have the toothache, 
according to what he himself has eaten, and he shall die 
only on account of his own sins. I will make a new cov- 
enant. I will write the Law no more on stones, but within 
the heart and bosom of man. Man shall no more set 
himself as a teacher, and say to his neighbor : Know God ; 
because every one then shall know me, the most humble 
as well as the greatest shall know me." 

Ezekiel is still more admirable on the point of personal 
responsibility, of the salvation of each through his own 
zvorks. He wards off any equivocation, takes up the 
argument thrice, and dwells on it with a vigor, a slowness, 
and a gravity worthy of the Roman jurists. It is evident 
that he is aware of the importance of the sacred stone, 
which he lays firmly and seals with lime and cement. The 
Jewish prophet and the wise man of Greece here agree 
and for once unite. The chapter in which Ezekiel sets 
forth God as a just judge, as Justice, is precisely in the 



252 Bible of Humanity. 

spirit of the Entyphron of Socrates: "The divine is 
divine in so far as it is just." 

The Jews, when transported to Chaldea, or sojourning in 
Egypt, experienced no great misfortune in their exile. 
They made a fortune. From a small people, exhausted, 
drained off, and ruined, they became, in those great em- 
pires, what they have been since, namely, rich and numer- 
ous tribes, carrying on commerce everywhere ; and the 
commerce of money entering through the back door, but 
entering nevertheless the palaces of kings, who appreciated 
their merit, their humble way, and their versatility. They 
became the general medium of commercial transactions.* 

The Jewish people, without abandoning the Mosaic in- 
stitute, or the faith of the prophets, adopted also another 
faith — the faith in gain, in money. In their great over- 
throws they said to themselves that riches were the only 
guarantee. " Riches are to the rich man a city, a fortress, 
as a wall by which he is surrounded " (Prov. xviii. 2). 
But what riches ? The easiest to keep or to save is gold. 
Indeed, is that so ? Something better, the invisible 
riches, gold invested in sure hands. If the Phoenicians, 
as it is said, invented alphabetic writing, the Jews in- 
vented the promissory note. 

This is a natural result of slave-life — an uneasy life — like 
that of a hare between two furrows. The Jews soon found 
out, also, the politics of the slave, which never failed at a 
court, to give , to give secretly. "A gift in secret allayeth 
anger " (Prov. xxi. 14). Servility, the unlimited worship 
of kings, now characterized them : " My son, fear thou 
Jehovah and the king" (Prov. xxiv. 21). "The wrath 
of a king is as messengers of death. In the light of the 
king's countenance is life, and his favor is as a cloud of 
the latter rain" (Prov. xvi. 14, 15). "Exhibit not 
thyself in the presence of the king, and stand not in the 

* This would seem to demonstrate their generic identity with the Phoeni- 
cians, who did precisely the same thing. — Ed. 



The Jew — The Servant. 253 

place of the great " {Prov. xxv. 6). A great number of 
similar maxims teach an extreme prudence, a perfect obe- 
dience, even a genuine admiration of monarchical power. 
The Jews will be loved by kings. There are no better 
slaves, more docile and more intelligent. Often they 
believe that the king is from God, but as a scourge 
{Prov. xxviii.i, and they honor even this scourge, being 
stayed by no humiliation, because, by keeping their own 
law. they believe that they do not debase themselves 
inwardly. Such a distinction is in practice a delicate and 
difficult one ; to be a saint behind the scene, and at the 
same time in front the pliable instrument of all the 
tyrannies of the world. 

The beautiful Jewish encyclopaedia, which people call 
the Bible, is in all its parts strongly marked with this 
spirit of business, of skill, and of thrift, which character- 
ized the Jews when they had become familiar and active 
with the affairs of great empires, by means of the bank, 
and intrigue — a pious, humble, prudent intrigue, which 
declined to play great parts. Its books were composed 
or rather written over again, and put in order from ancient 
fragments or records, perhaps; and were then reviewed, 
adopted and fixed permanently by the Great Synagogue 
that Esdras kept long assembled. In those books many 
antique features have been preserved. Many things, also, 
which the priests might have thrown away for the sake 
of decorum, have likewise been kept up in those books 
with a tenacity purely Jewish. 

What strikes us the most is a true, lively, but grave and 
moderate genius of narrative kept within bounds. Joseph 
and Jacob — the cunning man — delight and inspire the 
narrator. But his favorite hero is David, an Arabian-Jew, 
shrewd, valiant, impure, descended from Ruth the Moa- 
bitess (one of the tribe that was begotten through the 
incest of Lot), "the chief of the ruined people who fly 
into the desert." This cunning politician, more priest 
than the priests themselves, charmed and edified the peo- 



254 Bible of Humanity. 

pie by dancing before the ark, by singing and playing the 
fool* 

All this is wonderfully artful, strong, even savoring of 
the free-thinker. That which is wrong in it, is the pleas- 
ure with which the narrator seems to relish the general 
picture, relating over and over again the sensuality and 
revenge. He takes delight in describing some impossible 
revenges. The reader cannot believe a word of the 
frightful massacres which the Jews had made in the coun- 
try of Chanaan, of the pretended extermination of tribes, 
which were still extant in subsequent periods. Their 
numerous servitudes show conclusively that the Jews 
differed widely from the warlike Arabians, and could not 
have achieved those bloody glories. Such narratives are 
mere bragging, a revenge in words for the many evils en- 
dured. Similar narratives are found in the monkish 
chronicles of the age of Charles the Bald, in the Friar of 
Saint-Galb. This- good-natured friar, shut in his cell, 
wrote only of death and havoc. In his pages blood flowed 
like water. One of his convent heroes was so strong that 
with his lance he ran through seven warriors at once, and 
carried them all as on a spit. This reminds the reader 
of the wonderful stories of Joshua. 

Yet, that which saddens, that which may dry up the soul, 
are not so much those improbable massacres, the gross 
sensualities, as the general aridity. With the exception 
of some parts in Genesis, in the Judges y and in the books 
of Kings, the spirit of the Bible is harsh and dry. There 
is sometimes a flame, but it is the flame of a bush which 
blazes for a moment, glitters, burns, and frightens, but 
neither warms nor illumines. 

The aridity is radical both in the form and in the 
subject-matter. t All the progress of the Jews ends in 
deep sterility. 

* As was done at the processions of Bacchus or Baal. — Ed. 
f Nothing has cost me so much labor as this chapter. I love the Jews. 
I have not let slip any occasion to call to mind their martyrs, their family 



The Jew — The Servant. 255 

On one side there were the Pharisees, a set of men 
more estimable than it is generally believed, who were 
zealous of the Law, and who, according to Jeremiah and 
Ezekiel, seemed to have a natural bias toward the fruitful 
doctrines of the Greek and Roman uprightness, but they 
stopped in the narrow formalism of the Mosaic prescrip- 
tions. * 

On the other hand there was the mystical party, more 
independent of the Law ; this party appeared to gravi- 
tate toward love and Grace, but not finding in them the 
waves of the heart, sank in the strange eccentricity of a 
worship of grammar, the adoration of the language, and 
the religion of the alphabet. 

The Hebrew language, essentially fragmentary and ellip- 

virtues, the admirable abilities which they have displayed in our time. How 
could a man remain unconcerned about the destiny of this people, authors of 
the Christian world, and so much persecuted and maltreated by the Chris- 
tians ? As soon as one wishes to be severe toward them, he regrets it, and 
says : " The vices of the Jewish people are those which we have produced in 
them ; their virtues are their own." Let us then respect the patient people, 
whom, for so many centuries the world has smitten so hard, and who, in our 
days, have suffered so much in Russia. Let us respect the faithful people 
whose antique worship preserves the type from which humanity departed, and 
to which we are going back, the family pontificate, the type toward which 
the future bends. Let us respect the lively energy, which from the Oriental 
stock has raised up so many unforeseen talents, so many savants and profi- 
cients in every art. And yet how can one hold his peace ? It is through the 
ancient books of the Jews that slavery is authorized everywhere and sanctified. 
In the South of the United States of America, the slave-holders cited texts of 
the Bible to justify their prodigious crime. In Europe the Holy Alliance 
swore on the Jewish and Christian books. The Jews, all over the earth, have 
been the best slaves, and the prop of their tyrants also. Why ? Because they, 
more than any other set of men, had the secret liberty of that religious feeling 
which makes bondage and outrage an endurable burden. Moreover, they had 
the industrial turn of mind which makes the best of a tyrant, and converts 
slavery into the field of speculation. The Jewish race bids fair to have great 
destinies in future, because it is one of the acclimatable races of the world, as 
has been remarked by Mr. Bertillon, in his valuable book on this great subject 
o f acclim at at to n . 

* Does not the name Pharisee suggest that of Parsee, the votary of the re- 
ligion of the Avesta, a religion which evidently permeated the Mosaic polity in 
historical times? 



256 Bible of Humanity, 

tical, has the most rebellious idiom. It excludes deduc- 
tion. The most cruel sentence of Jehovah on the proph- 
ets, was that of imposing on them an impossible lan- 
guage. " I am a stutterer/' says Moses to him. All the 
prophets are so. All of them make terrible and desperate 
efforts to speak. Those efforts sometimes are sublime. 
Darts of fire leap up. . . . The lightnings, the night 
which follows them, penetrate the prophets themselves 
with sacred horror. This language seems to them to be 
either divine or God himself. The scribes call God the 
Word. 

Is it the Word of Ormuzd brought back from Persia ? 
Anybody would almost believe it to be so. Wrongfully. 

What Persia calls the Word is the emission of life, the 
divine manifestation of light and being, identical to the 
tree of life (Haoma), to the universal river, which proceeds 
from it and flows at its foot. 

The rich life of trees, fruits, flowing rivers, which had 
made Asia a paradise, is foreign to the Jews. The tree is 
accursed. The Word is no longer life, love, and genera- 
tion. It is the command, the saying of God. There are 
no more preludes. The being, that till that time came 
into the world through the progressive ways of impregna- 
tion and incubation, in their idea, is born all at once, 
alone, full-grown, and such as he will always remain. He 
springs up from nothing, is struck with terror, and falls on 
his knees. He is the effect of a masterstroke of divine 
policy — an arbitrary, accidental fact of that divine terrible 
will. 

But what will, what saying, what name ? Here is the 
rub, the great uneasiness of man. The universal mystery 
is to know of what syllables, of what letters the name of 
God is composed. A dreadful power is in it, and as soon 
as one can pronounce that name, one partakes of that 
very power. Let the profane who betray the secret be 
accursed ! The seventy authors of the Septuagint wish 
him who reveals it to be stoned. 



The Jew — The Servant. 257 

The name of God enlarges. From three letters (to 
express and embrace the divine perfections) it increases 
to twelve, to forty-two. The alphabet is divine. Each 
letter is a force of God. It is by the means of the 
alphabet that he has created. Man himself, through the 
use of certain letters, could create, could heal. The 
thirty- two ways of the almighty Wisdom comprise also 
the numbers (which are letters still), and some forms of 
grammar. 

Infancy of decrepitude ! . . . Piety is made to consist 
wholly in childish practices. The scribes called them- 
selves number ers y because they spent their lives in counting 
the words and letters which are contained in the sacred 
books.* 

In dotage all things unite. This magic of the alphabet, 
this queer superstition of letters, blended itself in a 
strange manner, with a unitarian mysticism in which man 
thought himself to be lost in God. Like things, however, 
are seen among Christians. The barren schoolmen, in 
their empty brains, fancy to rave of love. Saint Augustin, 
Saint Bernard, in imitation of the Jewish Rabbi, dare to 
imagine that God will descend into their hard hearts, into 
their searching minds disputing on a pin's point and aiming 
at a spark, and that he will consummate with them a spiri- 
tual marriage. They dare propose such a strange union, 
a nuptial bed made of needles and flints, to the great 
Soul, the Mother of worlds. They pretend, the insolents ! 
to possess this eternal lover ! they sing the song of love 
on their shrill psaltery. 

And what a song ! They go too far indeed ! Such a 
pathological case will astonish posterity. They are so far 
from nature, their minds are so much led astray, that both 
Jews and Christians choose a song of passionateness, the 
song of the morbid, shameless voluptuousness of Syria, to 
celebrate a marriage with God, a thing so frightful as to 
make angels turn pale ! 

* Franck : Kabale, p. 69. 



258 Bible of Humanity. 

It is indeed a devilish and demoniacal spectacle to see 
those Rabbis, those doctors, those bishops, those Fathers, 
repeat over and over again such impudicities, squeezing 
and wresting them, and say solemnly, but with a fright- 
fully-grimacing mouth, those words which are whispered 
on the pillow, the most secret avowals of a girl lost in the 
rage of love, and who can no longer refrain herself. 



i 



The World- Woman. 259 



CHAPTER VI. 
THE WORLD-WOMAN. 

TlIE Song of Songs is unquestionably the most popular 
part of the most popular book— the Bible, Wordly- 
minded men and unbelievers, as well as believers, have 

admired and read it over and over again, as the high ex- 
pression of oriental love, or, simply of love. 

It is evidently an incoherent collection of love-songs, 
but arranged in such a manner as to give some idea of 
unity to the whole. 

What is astonishing is that the Jews, who had no song 
of joy, should, for the celebration of their Passover, have 
adopted this song, which, in its principal features, is by no 
means a Jewish song. There is in it such a flight of im- 
agination, such a charm, such peculiar liberty, that it jars 
and contrasts with the gloomy Bible of the Jews, which in 
general is dry and constrained. In this song, on the con- 
trary, there is an unbounded effusion and openness, not in- 
deed of the heart and love, but of passion and desire. It 
is a song of Syria. 

The Shulamite * is of Syria. The Jewish woman is 
more restrained. Her lover would surely not have com- 
pared her with "the wild Arabian mare of Pharaoh, f " 
It is not of her that he, in trembling admiration, would 
have said, " that she was more terrible than an army in 
array of battle." 

The Jews have, through the means of harshest laws, 
restrained woman, imputing to her the Fall, and always 

* This term is the feminine of Solomon 
\ i. e., Hebrew, nD12> Susa^ a mare. — Ed. 



260 Bible of Humanity. 

fearing her as impure* and suspicious, and so much so as 
to give to a father the following strange advice : ' ' Never 
smile to your daughter, "f 

The Song of Songs would, surely, have never issued 
from a Jewish source. The marriage-ceremony among the 
Jews was severe, for the bought woman, led away by the 
man who placed a ring in her ear (or in her nose):): un- 
derwent a very hard judgment (too publicly) on her vir- 
ginity. The Jewish woman, so charming and so affecting 
through her humility, § does not exist in the presence of 
the law ; she is not numbered in the census of the people. 

The Shulamite in the Song of Songs is rather a girl of 
Syria, armed with seven spirits, in order to invade, 
trouble, tempt, unnerve man, and make of him a weak 
boy. This is the meaning of the Song of Songs, and it 
strongly stands out as soon as the reader throws aside 
the awkward additions by which it has been obscured. 

The Jews, having had the very strange idea of singing 

* Leviticus xii. 5. \ Ecclesiasticus, or Wisdom of Jesus\ vii. 24. 

% Even in our time, the Eastern woman carries often a ring at her nose as 
she would say : "I am obedient, subdued, and I will go whither people wish 
me to go." (All travellers are agreed upon this. See Savary I., 298 ; 
Lefevre I., 38, etc.) There was little difference between the married 
woman and the captive, who had a ring put on his nose or lip. (Rawlinson : 
Assyria, Vol. i., plate 297.) In the book of Genesis (ch. xxxiv. 47) the 
servant of Abraham places a ring on the nose of Rebecca, and Saint Jerome 
translates ridiculously: " I put the earring upon her face." (See Cahen's 
Bible.) The ring which disfigures the face and excludes the kiss, humiliates 
the woman very much, renders her more passive, a subdued female who sub- 
mits herself to pleasure. The reciprocity of it disappears. As to circumcised 
persons, who are less sensible than the uncircumcised ones (see Egypt's Plague 
by the Surgeon Savaresi), pleasure is slow and indefinite, single in the very 
conjugal act, as a long mystic dream, in which one sees only one's thoughts. 
When the lover in the Song of Songs says to his beloved that "her nose is 
haughty like the tower of Lebanon," he means to say that she is a virgin, 
has not received the ring at her nose, and is not yet subdued to conjugal 
humility. 

§ Among the Jews, a man says in the morning: " I thank Thee, O Lord, 
for not having made me a woman." The Jewish woman says: k 'I thank 
Thee, O Lord God, for having made me as Thou hast wished to make me." 



TJic World-Woman, 261 

such an erotic song at their holyday, believed that they 
sanctified it by supposing at first that it was a song of a 
'mate marriage. They next supposed that it was a 
song for royal nuptials, that which purifies anything. 
Then they supposed it to be the song of the blessed nup- 
tials <»f the holy King Solomon. Hence some of its gro- 
tesque ornament-, a- for instance the fifty strong men 
around the bed, ind then luxury and gold. Oh ! 

holy metal ! At the moment in which the beloved girl 
re-i^ts no longer, yields all herself, her lover who admires 
and adores fa . insipidly : " The joints of thy thighs 

are like jewels, the work of the hands of a cunning 
workman " | vii. i i. 

These are miserable additions, but which can easily be 
thrown aside. Freed of them the Song of Songs remains 
admirable for its local beaut\ thcr Syrian, burning 

with physical passion, though not very edifying, but full 
of a morbid spirit and of a kind of fever, as an autumnal 
wind, deadly and delightful. 

The story i- not obscure, as people have tried to make 
it. Indeed it is too clear. 

It is spring-time, the moment in which a festival was 
celebrated in Syria, Greece, and everywhere in order to 
open the casks and taste the wine of the last vintage.* 
It is the moment in which the red blood of Adonis flowed 
at Byblos with the sands of the torrent, itself a torrent of 
love, of desperate pleasure, of tears. A beautiful young 
man, an emir's son, I think, in his very prime of life, 
white, delicate, has come to the cellars which are excavated 
in the mountain, near the city, in order to open and taste 
the new wine. On his way thither he sees a beautiful girl, 
a dark one, whom the Eastern sun has richly colored, and 
who guards her vineyard thereabout. He invites her to 
go with him, to enter and to taste. She is very ignorant. 
This pretty young man with so sweet a voice appears to 

* The Anthcstcria or Broachings of the wine. — Ed. 



262 Bible of Humanity. 

her a girl, a small sister. She obeys, follows him, and I 
know not what he makes her drink, but she goes out of 
the cellar enraptured. She says : " Once more ! kiss me 
with kisses of thy mouth ! To touch thee* is better than 
the wine thou hast made me drink ! Oh, what a fragrant 
odor comes out of thee ! I will run after thee because of 
the fragrance of thy unguents !" 

The admiration of the innocent girl is occasioned by the 
very white breast of the young man, " ivory variegated 
with sapphire." f She compares herself with him and 
blushes; she excuses herself for not being white : '* If I 
am dusky the sun has scorched me. My mother's sons, 
who are angry with me, made me keeper of the vine- 
yard. . . . And behold, mine own vineyard I have 
not kept." 

I see her sad and pleading smile. No complaining. But 

I imagine that her little heart is uneasy. If her brothers 
are her masters, it is because she is an orphan. Will she 
not be ill-treated ? I fear it. She also fears it. She looks 
as though she is feeling in her heart that now her lover is 
to protect her. She presses close to him and will not quit 
him. "Tell me, thou whom my soul loveth so much, 
where feedest thou ? " In her simplicity she believes that 
he leads his flock himself. "Tell me where dost thou 
recline at noon?" And as he holds his peace, she, in 
order to render him jealous, adds, with a pretty threat : 

II That I may not mistake, and go as one straying toward 
the tents of thy companions." But she cannot get a word 
out of him about that. He flatters her, caresses her, and 
promises her beautiful necklaces. 

* To touch thy breast [DHT didim]. "Thy breast is more pleasant than 
wine." Nobody has understood that. It is necessary to imagine that the 
scene is in the country of Adonis, where the boy and the young man are more 
womanish than woman. In soft and warm regions woman is the true male 
(for instance, at Lima, etc. See Ulloa). In such a warm climate, the 
beautiful and strong girl of the fields sees this fine creature of a superior rank 
as an object of voluptuousness. 

f " I felt pity for Bajazet, I described to her his cAarms.—RACim. 



The World- Woman. 263 

She is a poor girl. lie is rich, and evidently he is 
afraid that she attaches herself to him. Is he of age to 
get married ? Would he not rather forget ? Nothing is 
known about all this. 

11 This is a very common story." Yes, but the sequel is 
by no means a common one. A charming and terrible 
power reveals itself in this girl. She is enraptured, trans- 
formed by love and passion. The seven spirits are in her, 
M they were in Sarah, in the book of Tobit, and in the 
Magdalen, who, by a single word, created a world. The 
power of this girl Consists in her actual weakness, in fol- 
lowing desperately her passion, in concealing nothing, in 
saying : "I am dying of love," in saying what no woman 
ever said. From that time the short poem, like the 
winged trumpet of demons, hurries on and carries every- 
thing before it. 

The loving young man comes to her over and over again 
in spite of himself. It is in vain that he escapes and 
eludes. Nay, for a moment (the ingratc), he laughs at 
the expense oC the poor girl, and boasts of his good 
fortune with his friends.* But he boasts in vain. lie is 
subdued. The wonder is that in seven nights she is really 
grown up in an extraordinary manner. She is noble and 
haughty, she is a queen ; he is struck with astonishment; 
he is almost afraid of her. She has become so imposing 

* He really speaks of her with an outrageous thoughtlessness, and already 
with the insolence of satiety. l * Eat and drink, my friends ! I have harvested 
completely. I plnckcd my myrrh with my balsam. . . . I have drunk my wine 
with my milk. I have eaten so well my honey that I have eaten also the 
honeycomb." Ignorant ! Hut everything remains yet; there is still what is 
more delicious. . . . Nevertheless it is in vain that he speaks, it is in vain that 
he plays the proud. He is attracted by an invisible power, which brings 
him back. He goes where she is, over and over again at night, and wishes 
that nobody may awake him. He is touched, he trembles, when, after some 
vain caresses, she on a sudden becomes gloomy. " Don't look at me so ! thou 
art terrible as a bannered host. This made me fly from thee. ... It seems 
to me that thou comest from the desert, from the dens of lions, the moun- 
tain of panthers ! " M My sister ! my friend ! one of thy sweet glances, the 
smallest of thy hair is enough to wound my heart." 



264 Bible of Humanity. 

and beautiful. In one word, she is the mistress of his 
house. 

Everybody knows this song by heart, and remembers 
the beautiful scene in which it is stated that she is lying 
sick, oh ! so very sick and fainting away, while her friends 
attend her — in that stormy and terrible night in which she, 
quite ready and having used perfumes, is waiting for him, 
hears him, thinks that he touches her, starts. . . . O ! 
misfortune ! he went away ! She goes round about the 
dark city, meets with soldiers, is beaten and wounded. 
But her lover is soft-hearted, he is moved, comes back, 
brings with him jewels, shoes, and beautiful robes. There 
he is dazzled with her beauty, he laughs no longer, and 
bends his knee before her.* 

This moment carries everything before it. " Let us set 
off," she says ; " let us go out into the country, and lodge 
in the villages ! Oh ! what a happiness to see on the 
morning the blossoms of the vineyard, and of the fruits ! 
There will I give thee my love ! " 

The evening has come. They are in the retirement of 
the country. She lovingly says : "The mandrakes give 
a smell," rendering women prolific. This tender hint 

* Lying still, languishing, having lost her garments on that cruel night, or 
not being able to endure them because of the overwhelming heat of the even- 
ing, she is waiting, she is in readiness for him. He is struck with compassion, 
tenderness, and admiration. He counts her charms, and describes his treas- 
ure as a miser does his gold. Although she is so confiding, and so submis- 
sive, she is none the less worthy, and she inspires every kind of respect. He 
puts on her naked foot elegant and rich shoes. She walks, and behold she is 
the daughter of a prince ! " O my beautiful one ! How noble thou art ! 
Thou art the queen of love ! Thy flowing locks are like the dark purple which 
consecrates the forehead of kings ! Thy head upon thee is like Carmel ! Thy 
nose like the tower which from a summit of Lebanon looks toward, and defies 
Damascus ! Thy throat is the full bunch of our rich grapes of Judea ! Thy 
stature resembles a palm tree. . . . Oh ! yes, I will climb the palm, and I 
will gather my fruits, and thy breast will be my vintage." This word falls on 
her heart like a spark. She throws her arms round his neck and exclaims : 
"O! the sweet word ! It is like the delicious wine which one tastes and 
relishes over and over again between his lips and teeth. . . . Let us go then." 
(The sequel is to be seen in my text.) 






The World- Woman. 265 

is not lost, as far as we can guess. On the morrow when 
he saw her quite another creature, perhaps already a 
mother, and transformed by an indescribable solemn grace, 
he says proudly, with an Oriental emphasis : " Who is this 
soft and voluptuous one, coming up out of the wilderness, 
leaning upon her beloved ? " 

All this is very natural, it is the manifestation of the 
blood in the South; it is the very climate of love. I confess, 
however, that one cannot read this song without feeling 
his head heavy. I prefer the pure love of Rama, of Sita, 
the scene in which the holy mountain, as spotless as its 
snows, poured over them a shower of flowers ! ... In 
this song there is too much of perfumes, of sharp and strong 
aromatics, and of drugged wines. I know not whether 
the Shulamite has, like Esther, passed "six months in the 
oil and six months in the myrrh ;" but the perfumed oil 
which swims in the cup of love makes one hesitate to 
drink. From verse to verse we meet with the word 
" myrrh," the perfume for embalming. In this song there 
is of it at least as much as would suffice to embalm three 
dead persons. There is also the spikenard, the dark Indian 
root of valerian, which has so powerful an effect on the 
nerves. There is likewise the cinnamon and numberless 
other aromatics of all kinds, from the insipid odor of the 
lily to the bitter and burning aloes, which puts forth its 
flower every ten years.* 

But is not love in itself intoxicating enough without 
having recourse to those odd drugs, so apt to confound 
the senses and pervert voluptuousness itself? They both 
smell each other, and do not distinguish themselves from 
their perfumes. " I will run after thee, because of the 
fragrance of thy unguents," she says; and he languishingly 



* In four pages, the word myrrh is employed seven times ; there occurs 
seventeen times the word frankincense and other perfumes, many of which 
are not very agreeable, as aloes, etc. In short, in this song there is a com- 
plete assortment of perfumes. 
12 



266 Bible of Humanity. 

enumerates one after another the exquisite odors, the ema- 
nations that come to him from his beloved one. 

All this is unwholesome, morbid. One turns mad at all 
this, and behold ! this ignorant girl, who yesterday was a 
virgin, has, all at once, some diabolical ideas in the pre- 
sence of the young man asleep. Is that her fault, or that of 
her race ? Innocently impure, in her veins runs some of 
the blood of Lot and of Myrrha. " Oh that thou wert as 
a brother of mine ! " etc. She looks as if she were groaning 
because she could not sin much more. Moreover, as a last 
motive, she many a time employs an astonishing request, 
boldly mentions the holiest remembrances. (There is the 
room in which my mother. . . . There is the tree under 
which thy mother. . . . etc.)* This is the greatest im- 
pudicity and it smells of the sepulchre. 

These words, uttered on the morrow of the last night, 
are the completion. They are followed by the decisive 
formula which puts an end to everything, and which 
might be interpreted thus : " For ever and ever." 

'.- Place me as a signet ring upon thy heart. Love is 
strong as death. . . .." That is to say : love is irrevocable. 
He takes her, embraces her and she becomes his wife. 
He wished he had all the world, to give it to her. At 
least, he gives her all he has, wishes to have nothing but 
with her.f 

She is delicate, but she is very shrewd. She thinks of 
her family. "We have a small sister, and she has no 

* This is even worse than Ham showing the drunkenness of Noah. There 
is in it something of the old genius of the Magians, and of the impiety of 
Babel. The principal passage has reference to the morning which follows the 
seven-night, in which he enjoyed witli her, in his own house in the solitary 
country. His love is quite assuaged. But she turns like a panther: "that 
thou wert as a brother of mine who sucked the breasts of my mother," etc. 
"I would lead thee," etc. "Thou wouldst instruct me; under this apple- 
tree," etc. " There thy mother was deflowered" (viii. i, 2, 5). 

f Nobody has understood this. But many have found out something bet- 
ter than the text. Mr. Dargaud says, in commenting upon this text with a 
charming delicacy, which this coarse text has not : "Man will give his life 
for love, and believe at the same time that he has given nothing." 



The World- Woman. 267 

breasts. What shall we do for our sister in the day that 
she shall be spoken for ? " She remembers well the two 
sisters, Leah and Rachel, wives of Jacob. When the 
second wife is to come, as it happens in the East, she her- 
self prefers to give her, to take the little girl who will be 
docile to her, to make the happiness of the small sister, 
toward whom she is rather a mother than a sister. Her 
husband smiles, understands, and under an Oriental, del- 
icate form, promises all that she wishes. 

To what a degree then she is the mistress, the spouse, 
and sure of her own situation ! "I feel to be as strong as 

o 

a wall, which would protect a city. My breasts are swol- 
len, and come up, as a tower, when I have found my peace 
in thee." 

Meanwhile some noise is heard. His young friends 
have discovered where he is, they come to search for him, 
they call on him. But she can dismiss him now. All 
is accomplished. He may go and amuse himself: " Go 
my young hart upon mountain of spices. . . . Flee and 
be like a gazelle ! " 

The explanation which I am giving is taken not in the 
clouds of the vague imagination, but in the text itself, fol- 
lowed closely, sentence after sentence, and brought back 
to its true local character : Syrian voluptuousness and now 
and then Jewish rudeness. It is to Solomon himself, to 
his vast experience of woman that I have asked the inter- 
pretation of the So?ig of Songs. Here I mean for Solomon 
the books attributed to him, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, etc. 
These books, sometimes harsh toward woman, especially 
the Syrian woman, describe none the less with force her 
mystery which may be rendered in this sentence : Magic 
of the seven demons. 

And this holds good not only in the woman of pleasure, 
the Delilahs, the Magdalens, and in those women of in- 
trigue and audacity, the Herodiases, the Jezebels, but 
also in the very virgin, the young Sarah of Tobias. 

Seven devils in this innocent one. All of them are in 



268 Bible of Humanity, 

love, jealous, domineering by turns. They all, from 
Astoreth to Belial, from Adonis to Balphegor, bustle 
about and fight for her. 

The seven gods of Syria — fish, serpents, doves, or en- 
chanted trees — " have been born by the god Desire." It 
is this god who endows the woman of the Song of Songs. 
When she comes out blushing from the cellar and says : 
" Once more ! " a luminous circlet is round her head. 
Is it the Arabian flash of the lightning of Jericho, of the 
girl with dark eyes ? Is it the expiring softness of the 
weeping women of Byblos ? Is it the strange, voluptuous 
enigma, which the eastern Jewish woman shows yet, and 
which one would fain divine ? 

All this is in it, but there is still more, namely, that which 
will be temptation itself— the humble avowal of woman, 
which, while it degrades her, makes her so strong. The 
bewildered enchantress of Theocritus and of Virgil, who 
melts away as wax before the fire, and who, through a 
desperate effort, calls back an absent one loved too much, 
has more of nobleness in her and agitates one less than 
the sick woman in the Song of Songs, who faints away 
among her friends and plainly says : " I am dying of 
love." 

She unites in herself the two characters of that woman, 
who, of all women, is to accomplish the Fall : She par- 
takes of the Angel and of the Brute. She is a queen, and 
a slave, subdued and desirous to obey. It is through this 
that she reigns, that she is irresistible. 

She has the force of binding up. Solomon, who had so 
much experienced it, says this in a marvellous way: 
" She is like the nets of the hunter. She is like the 
snares of the angler." * There are three things that are 
not to be satisfied, and a fourth one which never says 
{enough) : " The world of the dead, the fire, and the bar- 
ren womb ; the earth which is not satisfied with water." f 

* Ecclesiastes vii. 27. f Proverbs xxx. 16. 



The World- Woman. 269 

That which in the Song of Songs produces astonishment 
is, that at the moment in which the woman there spoken 
of seems abandoned to nature, and in which the mild 
Syrian female appears to be led astray in a dream^ the 
perfect lucidity of the Jewish woman subsists, and timidly 
reveals itself. Though young, how she knows already the 
course of the Oriental life, and the shortness of love ! 

This does perfectly agree with what the Proverbs of 
Solomon say elsewhere of the cautious, clever spirit of the 
mistress of the house, of her aptitude to business. She 
increases the fortune of her husband, makes and bids her 
servants make tissues, which she sells. With the labor of 
her hands she acquires, she buys a vineyard ; she becomes 
a land-owner and dresses herself in purple. But she does 
all this without injuring the interest of her husband — a 
simple easy man, magistrate of the city, whom she directs 
in his judgments. 

Solomon, who had seven hundred wives, and, as it is 
said, w as terribly enslaved by them, did not forgive them. 
" I have found," says he, " that woman is more bitter 
than death." He advises the husband to do what un- 
doubtedly he himself did, * namely : when she is unbear- 
able and quarrelsome, to go to dwell in a corner of the 
house-top. f 

* It seems that whilst the Wise man was studying the Universe, from the 
cedar to the hyssop, his queens, wanton Syrian women, or Arabians with 
burning blood, like the queen of Sheba, changed the gods, built temples — in 
a word, imposed on this great king the shame of the worship of Baal, which 
sets man at the foot of the woman. What is related about Aristotle in love, 
in a story of the Middle Ages (Aristotle, subdued by a fair woman, who rides 
on him and makes an ass of that wise man), is a mere trifle in comparison 
with the peculiar rite of Syria, which has been preserved among the Druses. 
Woman, any woman, and of whatever age, seated majestically in the temple, 
exacted from man, prostrated before her as an avowal of his nothingness, an 
obscene, humiliating homage to the power which people call feeble, and 
which, however, shares in the indefatigableness of nature. — "It is the very 
women of Syria who have introduced this rite." — Sacy, Asiatic Journal, 
1827, x., 341. 

f Proverbs xxv. 24. 



270 Bible of Humanity. 

The Jew, according to the advice of the wise king, goes 
more frequently to dwell in a corner of his house-top, far, 
very far from his wife, and there he occupies himself in 
making accounts, or in counting the words and the letters 
of the Bible. In his uneasy, trembling life, he is afraid 
of fecundity and follows the advice of the Ecclesiastes : 
" I wish thee to have few children." In the book of 
Wisdom, in order to reassure his conscience altogether, 
it is said: "that even the eunuch may be blessed by 
God." 

To all this must be added the weakening of the char- 
acter, a fact general at that time. In the innumerable 
misfortunes, and unforeseen, continual revolutions, which 
happened after Alexander, the heart and strength fell off. 
No men were left in the world. Each people lost the 
vigor of manhood. 

Vico has uttered this profound sentence : "In the 
ancient languages, he who says vanquished says woman." 
Sesostris, in having his victories engraved, gives to the 
vanquished man the sex of the spouse. The captive, like 
the bride in the East, had a ring in his lip, on his nose, 
and in his ear, in order that he might be led. Entire 
populations were thus dragged away, herds of children 
and women. From hand to hand, from master to master, 
they handed, with their gods of Asia, their voluptuous and 
gloomy rites. 

At this agitated time, there appeared a thing quite 
new and of infinite importance — the Novel. 

The history of the Jews, even their grave history, has 
the mark of romantic groundwork — the arbitrary miracle, 
in which God takes delight to choose the commonest 
man, even the unworthy one, as a Saviour, liberator, 
avenger of the people. At the time of the captivity the 
banking business, or the intrigue of the court, the sudden 
fortunes, hurled the imaginations into the field of the un- 
foreseen. It was at that time that appeared the very 
beautiful historical novels of Joseph, Ruth, Tobit, Esther, 



The World- Woman. 271 

Daniel, and many others.* They are always interwoven 
with two ideas : It is the good exiled man, who, through 
the explanation of dreams and his financial skill, becomes 
a minister or favorite — or the woman loved of God, who 
makes a great match, acquires glory, allures the enemy, 
and (astounding thing, contrary to the Mosaic ideas) is the 
Saviour of the people. According to Moses, woman was 
impure and dangerous, and had brought on the Fall. But 
it is just the unforeseen influence that the novel takes 
hold of.f God makes of woman a snare, makes use of 
her seduction, and through her operates the Fall of him 
whom he has condemned. 

Love is a lottery, Grace is a lottery. That is the 
essence of the novel. It is the contrary of history, not 
only because it subordinates great collective interests to 
•an individual destiny, but because it likes not the ways of 
'that difficult preparation which produces what happens in 
history. It moreover takes delight in showing us the 
cast of dice which hazard sometimes brings in, and in 
flattering us with the idea that what is impossible becomes 
sometimes possible. By means of this hope, of pleasure, 
of interest, it gains over the reader, spoiled from the 
beginning, and who reads on with such an eagerness as to 
overlook the want of talent in the plot, and even the want 
of tact. The chimerical spirit finds itself interested in the 
adventure, and wishes that it may have a fair issue. 

These Jewish novels, even the most admirable of them, 
Ruth, which is so finely planned and unexceptionally lascivi- 
ous, are sensual.:): They abound with feelings of devotion 



* The anacronisms in them are monstrous, as, for instance, if one should 
place at the same epoch S. Louis and Louis XIV. See de Wette, etc. 

f Sir, what is a novel ? Madam, a novel is what you have at this moment 
in your mind. For, as you care neither for your country, nor for science, nor 
even for religion, you brood over what Sterne calls a hobby-horse, and what 
I call a pretty little doll. Our novels are dull and insipid. Why ? Because 
we have not great poetry. 

% It is a skilful imitation of ancient times. The language does not show 



272 Bible of Humanity. 

and submission, and they breathe the deepest feeling of 
fear, fear of God and fear of the king, but they do not dis- 
guise at all the cunning by which woman is dexterously 
pushed forward, and the best made of her. Judith frankly 
says that the high priest sent her to the tent of Holo- 
fernes.* In the novel of Esther it is stated by what 
means the shrewd Mordocai engratiated himself with 
the eunuchs, in order to introduce his niece and secure for 
her the preference. 

Esther, a beautiful novel, is profoundly historical, and 
of immense instruction. It is not only at Susa and Baby- 
lon that captivity leads the beautiful and impressive girl. 
She will enter everywhere. Esther, through a thousand 
adventures of slavery, travels also in the West, and with 
her, her thousand sisters. If Asiatic men sought out and 
stole Grecian women, those splendid girls of the Pelo- 
ponnesus, with deep bosom, who had powerful voices, 
were good singers, and amused them — the Western men, 
on the contrary, wished to have Syrian women, the Greco- 
Phcenician of Cyprus, f of Ionia, of the Cyclades, of those 
dove-nests formerly established by Astarte. These had 
not run on the Taygetus, danced, wrestled, and taken those 
faultless forms, which the art has made eternal. They, in 
requital of that, appeared to have more of womanish' 
nature, and they were soft and loving from their birth. 
Easily trained to all lascivious arts, they made pleasure a 
religion and sexual rites a duty. The intelligent slave- 
merchant — an Ephesian or a Cappadocian — and the Ro- 
man Knights, who at a later day conducted this com- 
merce, gave the preference to those girls of the East who 
had voluptuous blood. They bought Jewish women who 



anything very ancient (de Wette). It must have been written against Esdras, 
who was driving away foreign women. 

* Saint Jerome is not scrupulous at all. He adroitly cuts off this verse. 

f See in Lamartine's Voyage the marvellous description of Miss Mala- 
gamba, a Grecian of Cyprus, with Syrian blood in her. Farther off, see in 
the same author the female of Jericho, with charming, eager, and terrible eyes. 



Th e Wo rid- Woman . 273 

were modest and restrained ; in reality, however, they 
were, if we must believe the prophet Ezekiel, of such a pro- 
digious ardor as to astonish Syria. Possessed of the 
gloomy spirit which sleeps beneath the Dead Sea, they 
besought to be enjoyed.* 

Those dreamers carried with them their ceremonies of 
impudicity, their purifications, their fears and remorses, 
their desires, and fetiches. Slavery, a powerful vehicle 
to scatter abroad woman and gods, led everywhere the 
deities of Syria. And it was because they were slaves that 
they became the rulers of the world. 

The Syrian woman, pursuing her destiny from one 
seraglio to another, and from one paramour to another 
(the seven devils helping her) ascended often very high. 
He who had had her when she was a little one, had despised 
and sold her over again, saw her one day seated at the side 
of a tetrarch, or of a Roman prince, under a name which 
disguised hcr.f Bearing a Roman name, and a Jewish 
soul, and smacking always of Esther, she acted through a 
morbid charm -the voluptuous and funeral odors of 
Adonises, the perfume of a god in the grave — and that 
magic of grief which made the Roman say : " Oh ! how 
much I like thee in thy tears." % 

Many and many women, called by Greek names, came 
from the Phoenician temples scattered in the islands, and 
may have been Orientals. Does not the same origin per- 
tain to the Delias, the Lesbias of Catullus, Tibullus, and 
Propertius ? Those women were from the Cyclades, and 
their lovers describe them as passionately fond of them, 
and very religious. 

They were brought up carefully by avaricious owners, 
who derived profit by them, and they were far more ac- 
complished and learned than the fashionable ladies of our 
own time. They were not at the disposal of every passer- 
by. They were hired for a prescribed time. They followed 

* Ezekiel xvi. 33. \ DrusiLla, Procla, and others. 

% Martial. 
12* 



274 Bible of Humanity. 

obediently such a great personage, or such temporary 
owner, occasionally in hard journeys, and even in the wars 
among the barbarians, as the Lycoris of Virgil. We per- 
ceive that this beautiful one, who inspired Gallus with so 
much love and so much despair, had a refined mind, 
capable of feeling the tender farewell of the muse.* 

" When I set off, Delia consulted all the gods."f These 
were surely the gods of Chaldea, Egypt, and Syria, the 
gods of the East. The women I speak of were very super- 
stitious. The weariness of their situation, the dislike of 
themselves made them wish and search for purifications. 
They willingly fled from their hard profession to obtain a 
liberty in I know not what chapel. The dearest liberty 
to them was to shed tears. 

Holy chapel ! At the smoky glimmering of old oils, 
with which the Chaldean and the Jew nourished their 
lamps, Delia, under the blackened vault, was not alone in 
praying. The noble and haughty matron, disguised, and 
in plain head-dress, is near to the humble girl. The hired 
beauty, and the great, powerful dame (who knows who 
she is ? Perhaps Caesar's wife) joined together will change 
the world. 

At Rome, customs mocked at laws. By law the woman 
there was poor ; but in reality she was very rich, had in- 
fluence, and ruled everything. Tullia, Volumnia, Cornelia, 
Agrippina show to us enough to make us believe that 

* "A few things to my Gallus, but which Lycoris herself may read!" — 
How much this tenth eclogue is pure and a thousand times lovelier (if we must 
say the truth) than the Song of Songs! Lycoris would surely not have needed 
to use the impure stimulus, the sharp cantharis of Lot and Myrrh. What I 
say of Lycoris holds good also of the Delia of Propertius, and of Tibullus. 
In those charming little poems of melancholy love, one forgets altogether that 
they are addressed to unfortunate women who could not dispose of themselves. 
Some admirable sentences call to mind the sweetest household affections. 
"What happiness! She is everything! At home I am nothing!" — And 
again: " To embrace her tenderly ! To listen, in her company, to the wild 
winds roaring at night ! " An humble wish, but so touching and so full of 
tenderness and innocence. 

f Propertius. 



The World- Woman. 275 

they were queens as well as the Marozias, the Vannozzas 
of the Middle Ages. 

Twice they undermined Rome. While Rome was 
striking hard on Carthage, and was thrusting back the 
East, they were undoing its victory, and were by night 
introducing in the asleep city the Eastern orgies {Bacchus 
Sabasius), and placing in it the horse of Troy. 

Now let us see the second blow. The orgies had 
been exhausted. But the gods of death, all the gods of 
Egypt, arrived. The funeral Egypt, enemy to the sea, 
embarked for Rome, carrying with Isis, its mixed, new 
god — Serapis with the sacred canopus. This Osiris from 
below — this Pluto — he alone swallowed and buried thirty 
gods ! He healed, killed, and buried. Anubis, his jackal, 
the barking corpse-eater, came with him : the bambino 
Horus in his mother's arms, and the wan Harpocrates, who 
followed with a halting step, were with him. The strange 
procession came down from the ship with torches, flames, 
and lamps. Amusing and dreary spectacle ! All this 
happened under Sylla. He was on the point of putting 
down all these gods of death in his tablets of proscription. 
But those gods were stronger than he. The women were 
not afraid, and protected them. Caesar, as a friend of 
Isis-Cleopatra, kept them up, and Antony did the same. 
They both did so for their own misfortune. Tiberius 
proscribed them, but in vain. If Rome adopted all the 
gods, why not likewise take in Death himself, the god 
whose love and worship increases and flourishes more and 
more ? 

Egypt is still too living. Humanity will go further into 
the gloomy kingdom than even Egypt itself. We shall 
find there dead men and ghosts even more dead than 
those we have just considered. 



276 Bible of Humanity. 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN WOMAN AND THE STOIC : LAW 
AND GRACE. 

The haughty genius of Rome seemed to have been or- 
dained to continue the Greek work of protecting the world 
from being swallowed up by the gods of Asia, who came — 
cruel or weeping — to bury the human soul. Whether 
Moloch assailed it with his iron horns, or Adonis interred it 
in the myrrh of the eternal wedding, the East was the grave. 

Immense and enormous struggle. In the history of the 
world there is nothing like the Punic wars. It is not there 
an Alexander who rushes through an overturned empire. 
The Punic wars are not the obscure wars of Csesar in wild 
forests, where he kills a hundred nations. Here every- 
thing is done in broad daylight. Hannibal and his army 
were indeed quite another thing than all this. It was a 
great day that on which the Unnamed God of Carthage, 
with the terrible machine of an army without a name, and 
with a strong genius of war, the strongest that ever was, 
rushed on Italy ; great was the day on which the East and 
Africa came into Italy through the Alps. It was then 
that the world knew that which Italy — the fruitful mother 
— had in her bosom. Italy did what Greece could never 
do, by raising two millions of soldiers — a rural mass, 
deeply thick. An honest, docile mass, indomitably re- 
signed and indefatigable to die. Rome, in those days, 
taught the whole world how to die. And in the long run, 
it was the monster that died. Infinite thanks are due to 
thee, great Italy ! all this will last for ever. 

Salve, magna parens frugum, Saturnia tellus ! 
Magna virum ! * 

* Virgil, Geor. II., 173-74. 

Hail, sweet Saturnian soil ! of fruitful grain 
Great Parent, greater of illustrious men. 

DRYDEN : Georgics ii., 241-42. 



The Struggle of Woman and the Stoic. 277 

The old Italian genius possessed a great science which 
is worth many philosophies, the science of the hearth and 
the tombs. The married household gods, guardians of 
the family ; the great gods Cousentes, married two by 
two — who, happier than men, are born and die on the 
same day— are an agreeable and venerable spectacle 
among the ancient Italians. The Etruscan and Italian 
tombs do not overwhelm us as the cemeteries of Egypt. 
They exalt our minds ; they console. They speak from 
man to man ; they teach us the course of time, the great 
ages of the world, the regular return of things.* Deep 
sense of history possessed only by this people, and which 
vivifies death and makes graves flourish. /;/ the urn was 
a perpetual spring. 

The respect of boundaries, of property, of the ground 
sacred by labor or by tombs, was admirably preparing 
this people to become, under the inspiration of Greece, 
the universal teacher of municipal laws. No other people 
was so strongly attached to the rights of the past, even to 
the imaginary ones. The infinite patience of the plebeian 
who fought so many centuries for the commonwealth, 
which however was so stern as always to thrust him back, 
cannot be accounted for but by the infinite meekness of 
the Italian husbandman. No mutiny but that on the 
Aventine hill — a peaceful secession. The result of it was 
a great one. Three things proceeded from it : the Roman 
fasces, by which Carthage was crushed ; the conquest of 
the world, and the organization of the most magnificent 
empire which the sun has ever beheld ; finally an immense 
work, unalterable in many parts, the colossal body of the 
Civil Law. 

I know what some say : " The Romans made war"— 
as well as other nations. " Rome had slaves " — as well as 
other nations. ''The Roman proconsuls abused their 
power " — as it always happens. Was Verres worse than 

* See my Roman History and especially Vico. 



278 Bible of Humanity. 

Hastings, whom the English acquitted ? Was he worse 
than the first Spanish governors, who depopulated Amer- 
ica ? Or was he worse than the Christians, who have 
made the year 1864 remarkable by the death of three 
peoples ? * 

Did Rome make the decline ? No, she inherited it. It 
was an ended world which fell in her hands. Men too 
frequently forget the depopulation, the chaos, the mili- 
tary revels, which humanity had undergone since Alex- 
ander the Great. The orgy centered and expired at 
Rome ; but it must by no means be called Roman, 
because, when it was almost a shadow, even in the 
midst of Rome, it was the debauchery of Asia,, of the 
East. 

Rome admitted all the gods, maintained all the laws of 
the vanquished, reserving for herself the right of appeal. 
She rendered homage to their genius. There is nothing 
which so much honors those sovereign magistrates as the 
boundless deference manifested by them towards the Gre- 
cian genius, acknowledging in it the authority of light, 
and confessing that they were indebted to it for every- 
thing. 

" You are going to Athens," Cicero writes to Atticus. 
" Revere the gods 1" 

The Greeks themselves have never spoken of Greece as 
Lucretius did in several lines, so solemn, so touching, 
and in such a deep strain. Virgil, the sacred genius 
of Italy, when he speaks of Greece, humbly descends 
from his tripod, lays down the laurels from his head, 
makes himself a disciple, an offspring of Hesiod, and 
follows him. Beautiful, amiable, touching tenderness ! 
He did not know how much the master was inferior 
to him. 

Rome herself was thrice on her knees before Greece, on 
account of language, philosophy, and the inspiration of 
the law itself. 

* Poland, Denmark, and Circassia. 



The Struggle of Woman and the Stoic, 279 

Every Roman had a Grecian preceptor, and learned the 
language of Homer thoroughly, even to the neglect of his 
own. They spoke Greek at Rome, even on those lively 
occasions in which the heart itself was prompted to speak, 
in the paroxysm of love,* under the stroke of death. 
When Caesar was struck, he cried out in Greek (hellen- 

The Romans asked of the Greeks the rule of life. In all 
the schools of Rome the Grecian philosophy sat as a queen. 
And I am not speaking about theoretical ideas, and spec- 
ulation. I speak of action, of customs, of deportment. 
The Greek philosopher, in every Roman household, was 
the adviser, of whom they asked strength and light in the 
perplexed moments of life. The heroes of resistance, the 
Thraseas, had their philosopher to attend them at their 
death. The emperors themselves had their Greek attend- 
ant, who restrained and soothed them. Augustus would 
have been but Octavius, except for his Greek adviser. 

In this noble antiquity there is nothing greater and 
nobler than the simplicity of Rome, who, although all- 
powerful and mistress of the world, asks help of Greece, 
of that ruined old Greece, already almost a desert, of 
Athens, which was comparatively a solitude. Rome, 
overwhelmed by her own grandeur, addressed herself to 
the poverty and moderation of Greece. " The Greeks 
were gifted by the muse with genius, speech, and a soul 
above dcsire.\ 

But how did Greece herself still live ? After the terri- 
ble conflict with the armies of Alexander, Greece was 
broken down, crushed, and desolated. What did re- 
main to poor Greece, when the Romans themselves car- 
ried away her gods, perhaps a million of statues ; when 
every altar was empty, and the heroes that decorated 
her squares, her streets, and her porticos were captives in 
Italy ? 



* Juvenal. \ Plutarch. % Horace. 



280 Bible of Humanity. 

It is in this that we must admire the might of the 
Hellenic gods. In them was found the basis on which 
Greece upheld Rome and humanity. Greece leaned upon 
Hercules. 

There was at Athens a portico, called the Cynosarges, 
sacred to him. It was there that, after the death of 
Socrates, Antisthenes fixed himself. He had been a 
disciple of Socrates, and alone pursued the revenge of his 
master and punished his accusers. In the decline which 
followed the Thirty Tyrants, he undertook the valiant en- 
terprise of placing before the eyes of the people the ideal 
of liberty. Hercules was eminently free, for, being able to 
have everything, he would have nothing. With the skin 
of a lion, and a club of olive-tree, he was king even more 
than Eurystheus himself. He was the model of Antis- 
thenes and of Diogenes, his disciple. Diogenes was by 
no means the fool some writers have represented him. 
He did what Solon had done before him — like the He- 
brew prophets. During a century he preached by his 
deeds, acting the comedy of Hercules. His exaggeration 
was the result of a purpose : " The teachers of a choir," 
he used to say, *' force the tune that they may bring up to 
it their pupils." The key, the tension, in the general 
slackness, is the philosophy of Hercules.* Thus the bow 
and the lyre had been strained in the hand of Apollo. 
There is a monument from which it is seen that Hercules 
while still young, in his enthusiasm for the beautiful and 
the sublime, takes the lyre and vies with Apollo himself. 
This tension is but harmony and mildness. Diogenes 
gave the solemn example of it. Although he was a slave, 
when charged by his master to bring up a child, he made 
of him an admirable man, through the most gentle edu- 
cation. 

The great myth of the Twelve Labors of Hercules 

* In all this I follow the Greek texts so well interpreted by Ravaisson 
(Aristotle, n), Vacherot (Introduction to the Philosophy of Alexandria, i), 
and Denis (History of Ideas, i). 



The Struggle of Woman and the Stoic. 281 

was the idea of the new philosophy, the glorification of 
labor. 

"The good god is Nature. Nature is reason, which 
toils and fashions the world." 

" Labor is the sovereign good." 

The workingman, the slave, is rehabilitated. Hercules 
is a slave to Eurystheus. Diogenes, sold by hazard, wishes 
to show that even in the midst of slavery, one may keep 
himself free. He declined to be ransomed. Some men 
who had been born slaves, as Menippes, Monimus, etc., 
were admitted at the Stoa, or Porch of Hercules, and they 
did the honor of it. 

Was all this a play ? One might have thought so. But 
through terrible circumstances, through the dreadful blows 
of fate, the barbarous military orgies, and the incarnation 
of the Tyrant, the Stoic was under the necessity of evin- 
cing that he was THE STRONG. The Passion of Callisthenes, 
crucified by the cruel madman at whose foot was the 
universe, for having stood up for honor and reason, this 
solemn event placed the school on the battle-field in the 
presence of death and torments. 

From the cross of Callisthenes was heard the sentence of 
the Prometheus, " O Justice, O my mother!" — and the 
last sentence of Socrates (in the Eutiphroii) : ''There is 
nothing holy but the Just." All this made up the doctrines 
of the Porch. Zeno and Chrysippus taught that Justice 
is holiness. "Themis is not enthroned beside Jupiter, as 
it is said. She is Jupiter himself, god of gods and 
sovereign good." 

" Good creates happiness. The wise man alone is 
happy. The just is happy in death, in grief, on the rack." 
Are these vain sentences? No. Action corresponded 
with them. The inward soul found a sublime alibi. A 
Stoic, when he was crushed and pounded, said to the 
tyrant who put him in the mortar: "Beat, crush, and 
pound. . . . You cannot reach my soul." 

The great part of resistance played by the Stoics at the 



282 Bible of Humanity, 

beginning of the Empire, presents them under a too 
peculiar aspect. What Horace calls the ferocious spirit 
of Cato obscures for us his stoicism, makes us believe it to 
be narrower than it is, and partly conceals its grandeur. 
It is generally unknown that stoicism, besides its funda- 
mental principle of Justice, from which originates Duty, 
admits also another principle, namely, Love, which is im- 
plied in true Justice. It is, however, to be observed that 
this is not a tardy mitigation of the time of Cicero, or 
Marcus Aurelius. Five hundred years before Marcus 
Aurelius, at the time of Alexander the Great, Zeno, who 
was the first Stoic, in his explanation of the universal 
commonwealth of the world, had said already : " Love is 
the god that saves the city. " * He is speaking of that love 
which is also called mutual friendship and human brother- 
hood. At the very first appeared then, distinctly, this 
sacred Trinity : The liberty of the soul, — the equal liberty 
(and which is extended even to the slave) — Love (of all 
for all), the great fraternal unity. 

It is easy, it would seem, that a happy man shold love 
and fraternize. But it is a beautiful, a great thing, to see 
a wretched man— in the midst of hard, monotonous, bar- 
ren labors, which dry up the soul — still love and frater- 
nize. Zeno had the good fortune of finding such a mira- 
cle in his disciple Cleonthes, who at night toiled, drawing 
water out of wells to irrigate gardens, and in the daytime 
meditated and philosophized. Zeno, delighted with him, 
called him the second Hercules. Cleonthes was gifted with 
the very soul, tender and good, of the hero. He laid down 
the great unalterable formula: ''Love begins with the 
mother and the father. From the family it extends to the 
village, to the commonwealth, to the people, and it be- 
comes the holy love of the world. From that time man, 



* Denis {History of Ideas') points out, with just reason, the error (volun- 
tary ?) of those who try to make people believe that these great ideas of the 
primitive Stoicism did not appear but in the Christian era. 



The Struggle of Woman and the Stoic. 283 

on the account only of being a man. is no longer a 
stranger to another man." 300 B.C. 

They did not stop here, by stating the principle only ; 
they carried its spirit into many practical questions which 
concern the province of Jurisprudence. From Paulus 
Emilius to Labeon, a Stoic lawyer, the Greeks, especially 
those of the Porch, prepared at the same time men and 
ideas. The right of equity softens and modifies the 
antique barbarity. That was the concern of the Praetor. 
But who is the Praetor ? The pupil of a Grecian philoso- 
pher, most frequently of a Stoic* 

What stopped the work of the Greek philosophers, and 
the Greek Wisdom ? What made barren the experience 
of the Roman statesman and jurist ? In a word, what 
prevented the restoration of the Empire ? Assuredly, it 
was the vices of the supreme power, but especially the 
weariness, the incredible weariness of the world at this 
epoch. The end of the Thirty years War, the exhaustion 
of Europe after Wallenstein and Tilly, the long devasta- 
tions of the hireling soldiers of that time, give but a feeble 
idea of the conditions of the ancient peoples after the 
three hundred years, during which the successors of 
Alexander, Phyrrus, Agathocles, and the hireling sol- 
diers of Carthage spread death and ruin everywhere. 
Above all, add to all this Marius and Sylla, the ferocious 
struggle of Italy herself, divided among soldiers — divided 
without profit ; for any improvement ceased. The wil- 
derness began then, even at the gates of Rome. " Even 
in the ancient cities an inhabitant rarely is to be seen going 
here and there." f 

The Fathers of the Church deceive us strangely, wish- 
ing to make us believe that the times of the heathen orgy 
continued through the Empire. It was concentrated in 
Rome with the excess of vices and that of riches. Any- 



* See Meister, Ortloff, and especially Laferriere, i860. 
f ; ' Rarus et antiquis habitator in urbibus errat." (Lucan.) 



284 Bible of Humanity, 

where else everything was dismal and poor. Greece was 
deserted, and the East had grown old. Except Alexan- 
dria and Antioch, new cities of some activity, there was 
everywhere a great silence, a great calmness, or rather a 
torpor, somnolency, paralysis. 

There was another cause of weariness, which the Fath- 
ers conceal from us. During three or four centuries sev- 
eral different gods had appeared, and passed away, suc- 
ceeding each other like shadows. The beautiful Grecian 
gods, Apollo and Minerva (about 400-300 before Christ) 
had made room for Bacchus, who swallowed up them all, 
even Jupiter himself. Bacchus, transformed into an East- 
ern God as Adonis-Sabazius, lost all his character. His 
mysteries were mixed and incorporated with those of 
Phrygia and Egypt, Atys, Isis, etc. Worthless displays ! 
Mithras, the inefficacious reviver, marched behind them. 

There were three epochs of gods after the effete Jupi- 
ter. The Fathers revive all those gods to make us believe 
that the new god, who vanquished them, had to fight hand 
to hand the fury of the antique orgies — the true Bacchus, 
with the horns of a bull, and the roaring lions of Cybeles. 
But all those gods had been buried. Jupiter and Bacchus 
had long been cold statues * in the Pantheon at Rome, and 
had no longer any power ; and they, unconcerned, could 
contemplate at leisure the struggle between Mithras and 
Jesus. 

There was a power, which undermined that worn out 
world. What power ? Strange as it may appear, it was 
the progress of humanity and equity — the vast and gene- 
rous equity of Right — that gave a hold to the deadly 
enemies of reason, to the gloomy destroyers of Right, and 
the Empire. 

Every nation step by step came to Rome. Rome was 
the common country. When Italy had taken down the 
barrier, when the good tyrant Cczsar, and the good tyrant 

* This is admirably stated in Quinet's works. 



The Straggle of Woman and the Stoic. 285 

Marc Antony, both lovers of Cleopatra, opened the door 
to the East, all mankind repaired thither and presented 
themselves. They were all admitted little by little. For, 
after all, they were men. The indulgence of the new Bac- 
chus (Caesar) who, in imitation of his god,* went about 
without belt, agrees on this point entirely with his enemy 
— the Stoic — and with the unbounded humanity of the 
doctrines of the Porch. Rome looked upon, and admired 
her new sons. She saw black Romans, from Libya ; yel- 
low Romans from Syria, and green-eyed Romans from the 
marshes of Friesland. The most incoherent mixtures 
were made of men half-made up, of barbarians (bears or 
seals ?) with the corpses and skeletons of the impure East, 
the residuum of empires, the tomb of tombs and caput 
mortum. And it happened, as in any mixture, that the 
wholesome sap was absorbed, and vitiated by the old 
rottenness. 

Alas ! rottenness and death were in the slave ; the vices 
of the free and his own. Raised up by the Stoic, the 
Roman Jurist and Law, replaced near the free, can the 
slave remove from himself the traces of his long misery ? 
Mark, that he is not the innocent laborer, the negro of 
America. The ancient slave was the match of his master 
in culture, malice, and perversity. Almost always it was 
the humble, graceful son of the East who came like a 
child-woman, and by means of love and intrigue made 
his Asiatic gods circulate in every palace of Rome. 

The agreeable Tyro is to Cicero more than a slave. He 
is his friend, the most obsequious of his friends, and yet 
at the same time the most powerful one, and the master 
of his master. Does any one likewise believe that Lycoris, 
the poetical, the Lycoris of Virgil, could really be a slave? 
Those beautiful ones, as soon as they were getting old, 
redeemed themselves and remained rich. In their return 

* Virgil : " Daphnis et Armenias curru subjungere tigres," etc. (Fierce 
tigers Daphnis taught the yoke to bear. — Dryden, Past. V., 43.) The 
ancient commentators apply this passage to Julius Caesar. 



286 Bible of Humanity. 

to Asia or Greece, they, honorable ladies then, and free 
to love whom and what they liked best, loved dreams, 
fables, the gods of the East. 

Scarcely different is the spirit of the true Roman Lady, 
the free Roman woman, the independent wife of a shadow 
of a husband, or the widow, a reigning, absolute mother of 
a child. If she is not a guardian, she does really perform 
what belongs to guardianship, having the custody of her 
son, and administering his property. Horace and Seneca 
inform us about that. Nor is this all. Precocius ex- 
cesses, which are more deadly to men than women, con- 
centrated at Rome, as well as in Greece, the family 
property in the hands of the woman. Both, the Law, 
generous and humane, and Nature, more and more power- 
ful, contributed to bring about this result. The heart 
speaks, and always to the advantage of the daughter. If 
the charming formula of the Northern laws* had not yet 
been written in the Roman statutes, the spirit lived through 
them all. " My sweet child, a severe right withheld from 
thee my property. But I, dear child, I make thee equal 
to thy brothers," etc. 

The France of the Revolution felt precisely this same 
outburst of the heart, when, on a sudden and without pre- 
paration, humanizing the civil law, she made of the French 
woman the richest woman in the world. The result was 
the same. By giving her property without giving her 
education, by making her rich without enlightening her, 
without placing her on a level with the culture of the age 
she lived in, the Law put in her hands the weapon for 
destroying the Law. The obstinate return of errors 
and misfortunes has never been more striking. To-day 
as at that time, then as to-day, the Revolution only suc- 
ceeded, to end by stifling itself. Paula and Metella, pro- 
vided with immense fortune, either as a dowry or heritage, 
had built for Serapis, for Mithras, for Jesus, chapels 

* Marculf. 



The Struggle of Woman and the Stoic. 287 

and temples, like those which in our own time crowd our 
cities — temples and chapels which were then as they are 
now the strongholds and citadels of counter-revolution. 

Strange sight ! To whom does the Law entrust these 
enormous forces? To the feeble person, to the sickly 
hand, to the fanciful and troubled heart, which is so easily 
preyed upon by imposition of all kinds. Who will save 
women from themselves ? Paula, in her vast abode, 
was afraid. Those rich enfranchised women, the Chloes 
and Phcebes of Saint Paul, Mary of Magdala, who has 
become so famous, trembled, haunted as they were by 
unknown Spirits. On the morrow of the ancient orgies, 
when everything had grown pale, and decayed, they 
hastened to the gloomy Chaldean (astrologer, or savant) 
who had succeeded the magians, and who consulted 
the sky and the stars to foretell destinies. Even the 
meagre and dirty Jew, who, in the field of Mars, 
lay down in a basqnet, was consulted by the uneasy 
woman. Great changes were at hand ; she was sure of 
that, she felt that ; she had them in herself, for they 
were struggling in her bosom. What were they? Ter- 
rible things, scarcely uttered, and only hinted at 

First of all, the end of the world, the universal death, a 
supreme catastrophe, which, carrying away at once our 
lives and our stains — an immense loathing — would free us 
from ourselves. 

She however had grown pale She would die 

and she would not. She was ready to ask for favor. . . . 
The man had got hold of her now. He made her hope 
(buy?) a great secret. "The world, in dying, does not 
die. An epoch passes away and another comes. Egypt 
and Etruria had no other mystery at the bottom of their 
tombs. The revolutions of things, the chorus of the hours 
of the world, in their eternal round, in each thousand 
years, bring back the sunset and the dawn. A living 
dawn is at hand, and it will begin again everything. The 
dawn is already beginning to light up the sky, the mys- 



288 Bible of Humanity. 

tery is on the point of being accomplished, and the cradle 
is ready. . . . Let us wait for the Divine Child " 

"Begin, O little boy, 
To single out thy mother with a smile ! "* 

Expiring Italy raised herself in her poet Virgil to 
make that vow, and tried to hope. Her poet, with long 
hair like that of a woman, her poet, an unhappy Sibyl, 
whose sighs were stifled, could on this occasion speak, and 
prophesy. His masters, the cruel statesmen, hoped that 
his sacred voice was just uniting the world on the cradle 
of a son of Augustus. 

The revolution of ages, the universal expectation, had 
to bring in a child, a little god-saviour. The lost, or Pro- 
serpina, the child Bacchus exposed on the sea, the gentle 
Adonai, wounded and risen, — these three young deities 
had enchanted the world. Atys had enraptured it by the 
touching show in which the recovered child gushed forth 
from a tree full of sighs. All this was very ingenious and 
charming, but at the same time it was worn out. In 
the halls of the emperors, it had not yet been determined 
whether the Messiahs were to be made anew, or to be 
proscribed. The mother of Augustus failed in the attempt, 
and every body laughed at her serpent, a servile imita- 
tion of the incarnation of Alexander. Maecenas judged 
it better not to try this expedient any longer, nor endure 
those contrivances, but to proscribe the Saviours, as 
dangerous to the Empire. Though endowed with so 
much mind, he was however not aware that any royalty 
is a Messiahnism. That individual, whose vast soul con- 
tains and exceeds the soul of a people, is necessarily an 
Avatar ', an incarnation. 

The last popular form had been Atys, a true image of 
the exhaustion of the world. After the fruitful and 
Priapic orgies, the powerless furor burst forth in this 
mutilated Atys, a girl-boy, and weak in both sexes. No 

* " Incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem." — Virgil. 



The Struggle of Woman and the Stoic. 289 

more robust men. Atys mourning over himself, mourns 
over humanity itself.* Nature appeared to have been 
herself contaminated with the sterility of man. The wan 
sun did not warm any longer. The tree dried up and the 
grass turned yellow. 

But though people cannot create any longer, they can 
remember, they can speak, and repeat words. What 
remains of life, is especially the voice, the echo. The 
god-word outlives the gods. Nothing was left of the 
Commonwealth. But the School subsisted. The new 
Saviour was the teacher. A gentle teacher with a low 
voice, who put the damper to render fainter the high 
tunes of the past, who introduced no change, and excited 
to no effort in order to know something new. The ancient 
teachers, Apollo and Orpheus, sang. Pythagoras taught 
by silence. Silence is too eloquent. There is no sweet- 
ness like that of those vague words muttered about night- 
fall to the woman, or to the child that wishes to sleep, and 
cannot. One cannot really tell whether the voice, which 
is uttered at that time, proceeds from without or from 
within. Is it a self out of one's self, the soul beloved, or 
own-self? The charm is too great to wish to dispel it. We 
hold fast to it ; we lazily fear to awake and to be too lucid, 
to resume the life of effort and of reason. " Above all, 
no more reason ! Let conscience be asleep ! Complete 
passivity ! Let the soul be nothing but an instrument ! " 
This is just what was inculcated by Philo, the contemporary 
of Jesus, and, as he has already been called, his brother 
as to his doctrine. He expressed very well the lazy 
somnolency of this passive epoch, when the world lay 
down under the fatality of the Eternal Empire. 

As to the pedantic discussions added to it by the Rabbis 
on the coming Messiah, who was to put an end to all 
things ; as to their rigmarole about the Logos, Wisdom, 
" the Son of man coming on the clouds, "+ they had no 



* Catullus. t Daniel. 

13 



290 Bible of Humanity, 

influence whatever on the spirits. The crowd held more 
tenaciously to the tradition of Syria, the incarnation of 
the Dove, and to the Jewish tradition of the Holy Ghost 
descending into a barren mother, causing her to bring 
forth a great Nazarene. 

These Biblical miracles, read over again and again on 
the festival days, made woman very pensive, when she 
mused on them in the evening. From the East, the 
golden star was seeing her, was following her, and darting 
its twinkling rays. The Saviours of Asia were the Sons of 
the star. Who has not sometimes seen it falling, and 
leaving here below a luminous trail, as a flow of heavenly 
life ? ... Its warm radiance makes the cheeks burn. . . . 
And even less than all this is necessary ; the Spirit, of 
which Elijah speaks, the softest breath of air is enough : 
" At first it was a storm, and it was not He. Then a 
strong wind came on, but it was not He. At last passed 
close by a tepid, soft wind. ... It was He." 



Triumph of Woman, 291 



CHAPTER VIII. 

TRIUMPH OF WOMAN. 

It is very logical that Christianity, conceived and born 
by the Virgin Mary, has produced, as its latest outcome, 
the Immaculate Conception. Mary contains it and includes 
it ; the mother of Mary and their female ancestors also 
contain and include it. A long feminine incubation, a 
continual bringing forth, produced this creation, which, as 
it has been truly said, owes nothing to man, having been 
brought about solely by woman. 

Up to the year 369, woman was a priest in the Greek, 
or Eastern Church, which is the mother church. There 
has never been a more legitimate priesthood. She is the 
true Christian priest. Who can, better than she does, ex- 
plain, make feel, and worship that which she herself has 
made ? It was in those first centuries, and through this 
charm, that the ancient idolatry was overthrown. No 
marble divinity could stand up when the living grace 
officiated at the altar. 

Mary was put aside, but only in order to return more 
powerful. She reigns at last. The Christians have made 
to her the avowal that she is the whole of Christianity. 
Saint Dominic declares that he has seen heaven, nay, more 
than heaven, in her bosom. He saw in it the three worlds, 
purgatory, hell, and paradise. 

The schoolmen were simply ridiculous, when they, 
wishing to be delirious in a wise manner, spoiled the fool- 
ishness of the cross — the feminine element, grace — by an 
impossible alloy of manly reason and justice. 

How is it that they did not perceive that at every 
step they made out of the path of grace in order to make 



292 Bible of Humanity. 

a masculine person of Jesus, they strayed out of the field 
of religion, and were but dialecticians and jurists ? Saint 
Thomas, who wore out his life in this impossible enter- 
prise (a triangle without any angle), repented of his fault 
on his death-bed, gave himself up to grace, and in his 
last moments he wished the song of songs only to be read 
to him. 

The lonely woman saw rising from her bosom her 
genius, her angel, and her young soul, a speaking soul 
which teaches in being born, and which tells to its mother 
all that she was already acquainted with. This soul, 
which was her son, was also her soft reflection, undistin- 
guished from herself, but by being loved the more. When 
he was twelve years old, and already grown handsomer, 
he was quite her mother, and yet her master, her lesson, 
her little doctor. She placed him before herself and 
knelt down at his feet. 

Ah ! behold him grown up, a beautiful and stately 
adolescent, with long hair which seems that of his mother, 
and with a sad and serious look. Is he her son ? Does 
she know it yet ? She likes much better that he be any- 
thing else, — a charming and austere doctor, a little feared, 
but so gentle ! Oh ! what voluptuousness it is to be 
taught, to obey, and in all this to be only timid, but not 
afraid ! This is more, or this is less than love ! The lover 
in the song of songs seems to know that, when she utters 
the subtle and deep sentence : " Thou shalt teach me." 

This is like the effect of a fair moon, when with its rays 
is blended a weak reflection of the setting sun. Many 
persons, from the very first, saw in all this an illusion, as 
though all this were nothing more than the soul of Mary 
contemplating itself, speaking to itself, teaching and loving 
itself, and creating itself, outside itself in order to be able 
to love itself. All this gave to tender-hearted people the 
advantage of allowing them to believe that the son of 
Mary had not suffered, and that his Passion had been an 
illusion likewise. The Docetce believed so, thinking that 



Triumph of Woman. 293 

God, having compassion, had not permitted his son to be 
tortured, but had given up to the fierceness of death only a 
shadow. This question is a very curious one, but nothing 
can elucidate it, and it will always be discussed and uncer- 
tain for ever. 

If somebody insists upon, and wishes, as my friend 
Ernest Renan, to state that Jesus lived and suffered, the 
essential point to sustain this assertion, and to consol- 
idate what Strauss has vaporized, is to replace him 
on his mother, to give him again her warm blood, and her 
tepid milk, and to look at him in the arms of the dreaming 
woman of Judca. One is astonished in seeing that the 
skilful galvanizcr, while with a caressing and fine hand he 
is making up the child again, denies him his mother. 
But without Mary,* no Jesus. 

The first Fathers of the Church, Origen, Epiphanius, 
Gregory of Nyssa, have by no means refused the Gospel of 
Mary written by James, the son of Joseph. f They call 
it tlie first of all gospds, and it is indeed the natural in- 
troduction to them all. Why does the Roman Catholic, or 
Western Church, so characteristically in her faith and pre- 
serving record of so many miracles, why does she put this 
small book among the apocryphal ? The ancient churches 
of the East accepted it without any objection, and had it 
translated into the Syriac, Arabian, and other languages. 
Our wise men of the sixteenth century have distinctly 

* Renan owes much to her. And his charming book, which perhaps will 
give to what is dying the respite asked by Hezekiah, does discuss in vain, 
because his book believes and makes others believe . It is useless for Renan 
to say that he doubts ; the reader is touched. Whence does such a charm 
come ? From Renan's genius ? . . . . From the power of the recollections 
of infancy and of the household ? Yes, from all this, and also from some- 
thing else. He has something more than his books in his stirred up journey. 
People see him now, and the future generations will always see him, between 
life and death, between the angel and the holy. . . . The wilderness decks 
itself with flowers it never had before, the fig-tree becomes green again, the 
water murmurs, and the birds of the parable warble. 

\ The first Gospel of James. Philo Jud^US, Codex apocryphns Novi 
Testamenti. Lipsiae, 1832. 



294 Bible of Humanity. 

stated that it was the groundwork of all — " the true pre- 
face to Mark." It is an innocent and amusing book, and 
not extravagantly doctrinal ; it is not full of Gnosticism, 
like the Gospel according to Samt John. 

Postel says that it is a pearl. And it is a pearl indeed 
for everybody that wishes to have a living Jesus, who, 
without his mother as the basis of his existence, seems to 
be a transparent shadow. 

The Jewish novels are greatly important. Esther, a 
well combined and very expressive novel, gives the key 
of the history of customs. From the remotest part of the 
East, from the inmost recesses of the seraglio, it illus- 
trates everything. The novel on Mary (if one wishes to 
call it so, according to the Latin Church) is not less in- 
structive. In reading it, one feels that there is in it the 
eternal Mary, who was in the Jewish soul. 

I have stated before, that the peculiarity of the Jewish 
people is, that behind the masculine forms of the Law and 
its stony tables, the stern countenance of the frightful, 
bull-faced Cherubim, there are among that people femi- 
nine sighs, vows of the gratuitous salvation, and the ex- 
pectation of deliverance through the unforeseen Grace 
from above. 

Peoples, no more than crystals, are ever to be classi- 
fied according to their external form, but according 
to their nucleus. Here, under a rough outside, under 
angles and points, you will find at the bottom the feminine 
element, Grace. It is Mary disguised with the beard of 
Aaron. 

The East was worn out. The Jews made illusion. But, 
they themselves, as it may be seen in their Nehemiah, 
were eaten up by usury at Jerusalem which was in ruin. 
The military plundering incursions made on them by 
Ptolemeus I., in favor of Egypt, the unclean inhumanity 
of Epiphanes, who contaminated everything, blunted 
many a soul, and, morally speaking, the Macchabees did 
not raise them up. The government of the Idumeans, 



Triumph of Woman. 295 

confirmed and upheld by Rome, the eternal Rome — sealed 
the Jews forever under the tombstone. In the infirm 
minds, the Legion of demons stirred and acted vigorously. 
There were possessed persons everywhere. Even this 
was an attraction. Many Jews from Egypt and from the 
East, as well as many other people who were not Jews, 
flocked to Jerusalem. The pride and the haughtiness of 
the Temple were repulsive. The Pharisees, the party 
that stood for the Law, the country, Jewish liberty — a 
sincere party, but a violent one — offered to those, whom 
they wished to convert, nothing but harshness and aridity. 
One liked better to hear, in the small synagogues, the 
condescending, indulgent Rabbis, who were popular both 
for the exemption from the Law and for their satires on 
the haughty doctors. Hillel, a predecessor of Jesus, was 
such a Rabbi as has been described. John the Baptist, a 
kinsman of Jesus, was such another.* The lessons of 
these teachers were, by no means, new ones. They said 
what the prophets, especially Isaiah, had said wonderfully 
well: "The heart is all." "Eh! what have I to do 
with your sacrifices ? " etc. This is identical with what is 
said in the sixty-first chapter of the Rdmayana. 

The precept "of loving one's neighbor as himself," 
precept of Confucius and the Stoics, had been, in a very 
peculiar manner, given to the Jews in the Leviticus. Even 
toward a stranger, whose ideas and ceremonies were so 
repugnant to Jewish feelings, the Jew was commanded 
11 to love him as himself "\ The precept " of rendering 
good for evil " is everywhere, especially in Manou VI. 92. 

The popular teacher appears to lead, while he really 
follows the people. He is, wittingly or unwittingly, the 
echo of the popular mind. The Jewish people found the 
yoke of the Pharisees to be heavy, for they made the 






* Jesus himself, it is said, is cited in the Talmud, as was also his brother, 
James the Just, or Yakob ha Tzadok. But this distinction between the Rab- 
bis or Scribes, and the Pharisees, appears fanciful. — Ed. 

■J- Leviticus xix. 37. 



296 Bible of Humanity. 

Mosaic virtues a condition for salvation, and imposed 
works — works in both senses, the work of the Law and 
the works of Charity. The Rabbi neither commanded nor 
required anything, but he said : " Love and believe. . . . 
All your sins are forgiven you." 

" But what to love? what to believe?" About that 
there was not a precise formula. To love the teacher, and 
to believe on the teacher ? * To take his very person, a 
living creed, for a symbol and a creed ? This is the very 
accurate meaning of all that Saint Paul has written and 
which has been marvellously well stated in this sentence. 
" Jesus taught nothing but himself, "f 

Every Rabbi gave himself for an object-lesson. If any 
had put the question to these crowds of women and simple- 
minded persons : " What do you believe ? " Each of them 
would have answered, " I believe on Hillel, the teacher. 
I believe on Paul, or I believe on Jesus." 

Personality is a singular mystery. Genius and beauty 
have often much less to do with it than some inexplicable 

* Could he teach otherwise the crowds whom he addressed ? With difficulty. 
The rough minds of the inhabitants of Judea, and the uneducated people of 
Galilee would have been shut out and deaf to fine moral inferences. It is a 
mockery to confound their short-witted sophia, which moves only on aphor- 
isms, and cannot analyze nor infer, with the Greek logos, which is undulating, 
deductive, and of a boundless scope. In Hebrew, even the most elementary 
distinctions are impossible. Our modern Hebraists, more precise than the 
Rabbis, and who know the Hebraic language thoroughly, say that it is an ob- 
scure and indistinct language, and so much so, that in it the words crime or 
injustice cannot be distinguished from the words misfortune, punishment, 
suffering. This is an obstacle for the translator at each step ; it creates for 
him a very great difficulty of becoming himself so much of a barbarian as to 
preserve to such words their immoral obscurity. The Jews did not accept, 
but at a very late period, the tenet of immortality, which, among many other 
peoples, was the foundation and support of morals. (See the excellent 
pamphlet of Isidore Cahen on this subject, and what he says at the beginning 
of the book of Job in the Bible translated by his father.) 

f This sentence is from Ren an. — Ha vet, in an admirable article, which 
is according to my heart's wishes, has judged of this literary masterpiece of 
Renan with a young, eloquent, and sympathetic ingenuousness, which does by 
no means exclude a very solid criticism. 



Triumph of Woman. 297 

aura or emanation of the individual. Nothing like per- 
sonality gives an energetic impulse to the great current of 
fanaticism. The Polish Messiah, a truly holy man, who 
in our own time attracted after him the greatest minds, 
possessed such a charm. A Russian Messiah in our days, 
although he was a nullity, possessed it likewise ; and he 
had the startling success of being followed, in his own 
spite, by ten millions of serfs. 

In the remarkable dispute in 1863, to which the book 
of Renan contributed so much, I regret two things : First. 
That the disputants held too closely to history, and spoke 
little about doctrine.* But doctrine is the main point. 
It is the doctrine that makes the doctor. Second. I regret 
that the disputants, holding fast to biography, put aside 
the little popular gospels, which, homely as they are, 
make us acquainted with the real condition of that age, 
more than the official gospels. I will not fill up the gaps 
of that discussion ; it is not my business. I only observe 
how very strangely the primitive gospel characterizes the 
world of women, by adding to the narrative appropriate 
words about the nativity and the life of the carpenter. 

Three women begin the whole : Anna, mother of the 
Virgin ; — Elizabeth, her kinswoman, the mother of Saint 
John the Baptist ; — and another Anna, a prophetess, and 
the wife of the high priest. f 

The foregoing incidents evidently took place around 
the temple, and under the direction of the priests. The 
families in question were dependent on them. The 
women believed that the fulness of time had come, and 

* Patrice Larroque, a worthy and austere wise man, has vigorously filled 
up the gap, with a courageous boldness and seriousness which cannot be ad- 
mired too much. — Peyrat has exhausted the biographical question, making 
it plain with a firm and impartial logic, in a book which ought, in a definitive 
manner, to put an end to this great criticism. 

f There is no evidence in the text that Anna was the wife or widow of a 
priest ; but simply that she was a woman who abode at or near the temple, 
perhaps as consecrated. But the first two chapters of the Gospel of Luke, 
and the stories of Anna, mother of the Virgin, are hardly trustworthy. — Ed. 



298 Bible of Humanity. 

that a wonderful personage would proceed from them ; 
they were in a feverish state of mind because of their 
dream, had almost become pregnant by their dream, 
and ardently wished to give birth to something. The 
priests, on their part, seeing that everything was ready, 
hoped and desired that nothing of the sort would occur, 
except through them. 

The Messianic condition, to be an aged person, and 
barren up to that time, was precisely verified in the two 
cousins, Anna and Elizabeth. Was their barrenness pro- 
cured, or designed, according to the cunning prudence 
taught in the book of the Ecclesiastes f The ministers of 
the temple put Zacharias and Anna, his wife, to shame for 
their sterility ; and then Anna became the mother of 
Mary. 

The little Mary, a rich heiress, given to the temple, 
remained in it from the time she was three years old until 
she was twelve. The priests, being unable to keep her 
among their sons, and near the son of the high priest, for 
whom she was intended, compelled Joseph, who was one 
of the carpenters of the temple and a man devoted to 
them, to take her with him. Joseph was the father of 
several boys and girls. His wife died, his sons married, ex- 
cept Juda, his eldest son, and James, his grandson, whom 
the good little Mary consoled, adopted, and brought up. 

Mary, whom the priests did not lose sight of, worked 
for the temple. Her task was one of confidence, namely, 
that of weaving the purple (very dear stuff), for the great 
vail of the Holy of Holies.* Here is a pleasing description 
of her life as a working woman. She prayed in the morn- 



* The weaving of curtains appears to have been a pursuit at all temples, and 
the Kadeshuth or consecrated women performed the work. When Manasseh 
placed the Ashera, or image of Astarte or Venus-Urania, in the temple, there 
weie houses of Kadeshim, Galii, or consecrated persons there, "where the 
women wove hangings for the grove or Ashera" In many temples young 
girls were chosen for the purpose, and dismissed at the conclusion of their 
tas . — Ed. 



Triumph of Woman. 299 

ing, in the pure hours ; she prayed in the evening, in the 
mysterious hours. She worked from nine to three o'clock, 
and in those hours it was warm ; she scarcely ate in the 
evening. One seems to be reading the life of a little 
devotee of Flandres. Those pious working-women, in the 
darkness of their cellars,* poured out their overflowing 
heart in small songs of infancy, called the songs of lolo. 
The poor girl of Judca, who sang less, and watched over 
everything, at intervals "shone forth as a dazzling snow, 
which the eye could hardly look at." 

One may conjecture her thoughts. It was now six 
months that her aged cousin Elizabeth, who had never 
had a child, was pregnant. With a prophet ? With a 
forerunner ? One might well suppose that. At that 
time everybody spoke of nothing but miracles, of Mes- 
siahs, and of incarnation. The air was impregnated and 
heavy with this subject. 

At the burning hour, when her work ceased, during the 
long hours of the afternoon, those sickly hours in which 
Cassianus says, that the friars pine away, of what did this 
young woman dream ? She was already sixteen. What 
did she see ? The heavenly dove? The divine lightning? 
Or did she see in the evening the angel, who brought her 
nourishment? All this is pure and affecting in the little 
Gospels, which in some parts bear the characteristic of the 
people more than the official ones, and exhibit more of 
nature and more of heart. 

They tell us distinctly that Joseph and Mary were not 
united in wedlock. They thrust away the idea of adultery. 
This was a wise foresight, which would have made the 
legend less dangerous, by hindering the indecent jests, 
the facetious Christmas songs, which during all the Middle 
Ages made marriage contemptible. 

The fate, the fruitful extent of this religion of woman 
would have been quite different, if the official Gospels, in- 

* Damp, and therefore dark apartments, were necessary for this work, to 
enable the threads to be of sufficient fineness. — Ed. 



300 Bible of Humanity. 

stead of weaning Jesus harshly and abruptly, had given 
him the milk of nature. He would have been more of a 
man. What beautiful and useful fables might have been 
imagined upon that subject ! It would then have been 
necessary to have heart, goodness, and affection. And all 
this is wanting in the Gospels. There is love in them, but 
that is quite another thing. Love is not goodness ; it is 
often a dry, and sometimes a violent and passionate ardor. 

Nothing is more likely than the journey to Egypt, as 
Munk has well remarked. Egypt is very near Palestine, 
and people went there by sea continually. Philo,* the 
Egyptian Jew, professed the doctrine of Jesus and of Paul, 
under a more philosopical form. 

Moses, as is expressly said, received his education at 
the Egyptian court. Hence the precocious understanding 
of Jesus, who, when he was twelve years old questioned 
the doctors and made them hold their peace (as Daniel 
when a boy had made the judges dumb). The mother 
of Jesus, who had encouraged him at first, began now to 
be afraid, and would stop him. Poor mother ! . . . And 
why speak harshly to her ? 

* Philo Judseus who was born a short time before Jesus, and who died a 
short time after him, under Claudius, exhibits in a clear manner the chaos of 
those foolish sciences, which in the brains of the Jews mixed up the doctrines 
of Plato and Moses with the revelations of Ezekiel and Daniel. On the very- 
obscure epoch of the Messianic precedents, between Daniel, Jesus son of 
Sirach, Philo, etc., Michel Nicolas, one of the ablest critics of our 
days, has thrown such light as the subject allowed. His is a robust mind, 
cautiously bold, which scorns false splendor, aims at the bottom of any 
subject, and reaches its depth. In his article on L. Menars he has in a 
wonderful manner laid down this great principle : " The heart creates faith. 
Greece created her gods before the gods themselves had given her an exis- 
tence." The great question of sacerdotal genius, in which the poor Ben- 
jamin Constant maintained the truth against Eckstein with so little en- 
couragement, has been now decided with the ever increasing light of science 
by Michel Nicolas. {Essays, p. 76.) He says that if the Greeks had not 
escaped from theocracy, Herodotus would have been a Vincent of Beau- 
vais ; Plato a Duns Scot ; that Homer would have written a work like 
Fiert-a-bras, and the Prometheus of ^Eschylus would have been like the 
Mysteries of the Passion. Michel Nicolas : Essays, p. 76. 



Triumph of Woman. 301 

Henceforth it was the crowd that was Jesus' mother and 
sister. He was followed by his mother's sister, Mary, the 
wife of Cleophas. He was also followed by other ladies 
whom he charmed and consoled. They were very in- 
teresting women, some of them the wives of magistrates, 
and, alas ! connected willingly or unwillingly with a thou- 
sand unjust and cruel things. They flung themselves at 
this young Rabbi's feet, and gave themselves up to his soft 
doctrine, which washed off and wiped out all this. They 
followed him ; they could not quit him, and they min- 
istered to him. He was followed even more eagerly by 
many unhappy women, weary of their unchaste life, and 
their sins, who had no repose and whose disordered life 
made them seem to be possessed of the demon. Such a 
one was the unfortunate Mary of Magdala, who has been 
called a courtesan, and who (as likewise those women I 
am about to mention) must have been, as is often the case, 
an enfranchised woman, ransomed and retired from such 
a cruel infamous life. The warm outpouring of her heart 
and of her gratitude, the perfumes with which she em- 
balmed her teacher while he was still living, and which 
she wiped out with her hair, is a very beautiful and 
passionate story, forming the most perfect contrast to the 
coldness with which the Virgin is treated in the Gospels* 

This, however, is a logical sequel of the Jewish tradition, 
in which preferences are given less to those who are just 
and irreproachable, than to those who, having sinned 
much, and standing in more utter need of pardon, make 
Grace shine much more. 

Magdalene, according to Saint John, was the sole wit* 



* It will be seen from this attributing of several incidents to one person, 
that the legends from which Michelet derived this story, treat Mary of Mag- 
dala in Galilee, the courtesan at the house of Simon the Pharisee {Luke vii. 
37-5o), and Mary, the sister of Martha, whom Jesus loved, who " chose that 
good part," and anointed the head of Jesus at Bethany, at the house of Simon 
the leper, as the same person. The Gospels are not quite clear on the mat- 
ter. — Ed. 



302 Bible of Humanity. 

ness of Jesus' resurrection. She alone saw it with her 
heart's eyes. The world has believed her word. 

Violent doubters are very liable to become quickly 
credulous. Men, self-styled positive, by a sudden change 
which happens very often, are wistful visionaries. Paul, 
a Jew from Tarsus and a tent-maker, a haughty and vehe- 
ment man, showed, in his commercial travels, the great 
zeal of a Pharisee.* He had the misfortune to take part 
in the stoning of Saint Stephen. The young martyr's 
figure, in all its touching meekness, remained, doubtless, 
impressed on him and never left him. A storm, a fall, 
a flash of lightning, accidents which are so common, 
upset him. The more impetuous zealot he had been for 
the Law, the more ardent, hasty and imperious he was 
under Grace. 

Such a man belongs to women. And indeed the Acts 
of the Apostles and the Epistles exhibit him always with 
them. They seem to let him never go out of their sight. 
Thekla follows him as a sister, and performs for him the 
humble duties of Martha, if not those of Mary. 

In all this history the personality of this impetuous man 
is a curious one on account of its variations. His peculiar 
struggle is against the Greek mind, and, as he boldly 
states it, against Reason. f In his manifesto to the 
Greeks,;): he acts precisely as David did when he danced 
before the Ark, boasting of his folly, and proclaiming 
himself a fool for Jesus sake, " because the foolishness 
of God is wiser than men."§ And all this is said in a 
hasty, eloquent, very naive manner, showing all the heart, 

* Living away from Judea, Paul could not be as acceptable to the residents 
of that province. Besides, Tarsus was in constant communication with 
Greece, Alexandria and Pontus ; so that he had abundant opportunity to be 
indoctrinated in the Mithraic doctrines as well as the Mystic and Platonic 
learning. Indeed, he shows as much in the Epistles, which on all doubtful 
points, are more reliable than the Acts of the Apostles. — Ed. 

f Not quite correct. It was the logos or sophia of the Grecian philosophers, 
that he thus abjured. — Ed. 

% Epistles to the Corinthians, I., II. § I. Corinthians, i. 25. 



Triumph of Woman. 303 

and the very real difficulties of an honest and pure man in 
a society of ardent and passionate women. 

At Macedonia, whence he writes, he is between two 
women. Lydia, at whose house he dwells, and the Pallid, 
Chloe, at whose house the small congregation met. This 
nickname, the Pallid, seems to be that of a retired, en- 
franchised woman, and doubtless a rich woman too, as 
Mary of Magdala was. At the beginning, while he gives 
advice about continence, he boasts to be above all that.* 
Wrongfully. Later he confesses that he has " a thorn in 
his flesh ; that the messenger of Satan buffets him, lest 
he should be exalted above measure, "f This is a moving 
avowal, which one would least have expected. It is to 
be regretted that we know not who were those charm- 
ing and dangerous persons, that had such power over him 
as to put an obstacle to his so great burst of purity. 

Nothing is known about this Lydia. She seems to be 
of Syria, the country of seductions. She was a trades- 
woman, and, doubtless, a prudent one like the woman 
who, in the Proverbs of Solomon, so well superintended 
housekeeping, enriched her home, made and sold tissues, 
etc. Lydia sold purple, a costly article of merchandise, 
bought by the Romans, especially by Magistrates, Praetors, 
and Procurators. Such a tradeswoman was a lady, and 
perhaps of the first rank. 

The continuation is a peculiar one. He says, that in 
the midst of those temptations he besought the Lord 
thrice, that it might depart from him. " But he has said 
unto me : My grace is sufficient for thee. My strength is 
made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I 

* [. Corinthians, vii. 7, 8. 

f II. Corinthians, xii. 8. He seems to have undergone a kind of ecstasis, 
which he regarded as equivalent to the disclosures to the Epopt at the Mys- 
teries. "I come to visions and revelations of the Lord. I knew a man in 
Christ about fourteen years ago, whether in body I cannot tell, or whether out 
of body I cannot tell, caught up to the third heaven .... into paradise, and 
he heard things arcane." It is in this connection that he speaks of the thorn 
in the flesh, and in no relation to seductive women. — Ed. 



304 Bible of Humanity. 

rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ 
may rest upon me." Such ideas have a dangerous import, 
which, without doubt, people did not consider at those 
times of primitive purity. The mystics have interpreted 
them thus: "By sin, one rises. In sinning we glorify 
God." These are the proper expressions of Molinos. 

Paul himself, however, was, as I believe, indignant 
against his fluctuations. One seems to feel his indignation 
in the vehement words which he addresses to woman to 
humiliate her, harshly exhorting her to silence, to sub- 
mission ; reminding her that the image of God is in man, 
and that she has been created for him ; that she may 
not pray except vailed, and that her long hair has been 
bestowed on her for this purpose,* etc. 

Such vehement outbursts would make us believe that 
woman will be kept far off from the altar. But the con- 
trary happened. She was a priest : , officiated, and was 
consecrated during four hundred years. 

Paul even contradicted himself. Arriving at Corinth, he 
perceived quite well that the Grecian woman, with her 
noble beauty, her subtle and eloquent speech, was his 
great auxiliary. Phcebe, the Brilliant, the name of another 
enfranchised woman, was already the active minister, the 
factotum of the church of Corinth. She was a deaconess 
at first. The former companions of Paul, Barnabas and 
Thekla, were no longer with him. Phcebe was now every- 
thing. She gave him lodgings. She wrote for him f under 

* I. Corinthians, xi. 3-15. 

f This has been suppressed in the Latin translation of the Bible. It has 
been suppressed also in the Greek original of the Didot edition (1842) which 
is dedicated to Affre. — The original Greek says: Eypacprj Sia (poi6r\s. The 
ancient French translator of the Reformed Church honestly and literally 
translated that Phcebe wrote from the dictation of Saint Paul. If the Greek 
word meant only that he sent the letter by Phcebe (as Jowett of Oxford 
thinks), it would be a useless repetition. Paul had spoken before of the expedi- 
tion of Phcebe, had recommended her, etc. * 



* Nevertheless, other Epistles have the same preposition, and several persons are so indi* 
cated. M. Michelet is probably in error. — Ed. 



Triumph of Woman. 305 

his dictation. The reason of it is not known. Was he 
sick? And what did she write? The most vehement 
writing of Saint Paul. 

Here is expressly stated what one might have conjec- 
tured, that such a hasty, lively, but incoherent eloquence, 
which goes by fits and starts, and is so often in violation 
of logic and reason, is not written. A Jew of Asia Minor, 
a country where languages were mixed up, a travelling 
tradesman and merchant of Cilicia, the Babel of free- 
booters whom Pompey crushed, must have spoken a 
Greek very much mixed with Hebraisms and with Greco- 
Syriac dialects. But the ardor, the boldness, the vehe- 
ment spirit which hurried him on, scarcely stopped at 
that. He spoke, he thundered, he overwhelmed. The 
Greeks around him, with their rapid hand, and the ladies 
so zealous, picked up what they could from his talk, and 
wrote off-hand. Very often they were compelled to trans- 
late, and they performed the task without scrupulousness 
(for they were animated by the same ardor), but not with- 
out danger ; because Paul's ideas, thought in Hebrew and 
uttered in bad Greek, at the risk of their sense and in- 
spiration, could hardly be settled in tolerable Greek lan- 
guage, except by serious changes, mutilations, and sup- 
pressions which are quite well perceptible in the shocks and 
jolts, as of a race at full speed on a very uneven ground. 

A complex and collective work, the Epistle to the 
Romci7is — the Marseilles Hymn of the Gospel of Grace, 
the utter setting at naught of the law— seems indeed 
to have been composed by the whole church of Cor- 
inth. Saint Paul contributed the glimpse of genius, and 
Phoebe her skillful pen. Erastus, the public treasurer 
of the port through which at that time passed all the 
commerce of Greece— Erastus, the important person,whose 
greeting Saint Paul sends to the Emperor's household, may 
have had a great influence on the contents of that epistle. 
A profound revolution was taking place in the Empire. 
The Emperor almost everywhere had m bstituted for the 
20 



306 Bible of Humanity. 

Prastor, who was the man for the State, his own Procu- 
rator ', his agent, a steward of his household, of his own 
interests — whether he were a Roman or not — and often 
one of his freedmen. Erastus, whose name is a Greek 
one, and who was the friend of Saint Paul, may have been 
an enfranchised man. This representative of personal 
government, of favor and of Grace, raised as he had 
recently been to dignity by Claudius or Nero, was fatally, 
as well as Saint Paul, an enemy to the Law and a born 
adversary of the Jurist. 

The whole Epistle is contained in this sentence : The 
Law alone made sin : the law being dead, sin is dead.* 
This is a sentence with many meanings. The word Law, 
among the Jews, signifies the Mosaic Law ; in the Empire, 
the Roman Law ; and according to the Greek idea, the law 
of conscience and natural equity. 

But now, by having broken to pieces the tablets of 
stone, and the tables of brass, and having struck out the 
prohibition of evil, is it by any means certain that evil has 
disappeared from the world, and eternal justice has also 
been struck out ? 

Justice, that was a queen in ^Eschylus and Socrates, in 
Zeno and Labeo, has became again a servant ; or rather 
Justice has been destroyed by love and faith, by the divine 
intoxication and the orgies of Grace. 

It will be seen with what power the administrative revo- 
lution, and the religious revolution agreed well together; 
and to what a degree the agent of good favor, the delegate 
of Caesar must have been in secret understanding with 
Phcebe, and with the Apostle of the East. Their mani- 
festo to Rome, to the city of Authority, means precisely 
this: " Death to Authority." 

Phcebe did not trust to anybody for carrying this 
Epistle to the palace of Nero •, to the friends of Narcissus. 
This is expressly stated in it. 

* Epistle to the Romans, vii. 8. The same sophism appears also in the 
First Epistle to the Corinthians, xv. 56, 57. 



Triumph of Woman. 307 

I say Nero and not Claudius, because the latter had ex- 
pelled the Jews from Rome. In his reign it was hardly 
possible to send to Rome the embassy of a sect which at 
that time was considered to be entirely Jewish. 

Phoebe did not go unarmed. She carried with her two 
keys which would open the household of the Emperor 
with great facility. 

The real masters of the Imperial household were the 
priest-prostitutes of both sexes, the Galli and Nautch- 
girls, the Narcissuses and Pallakics, peculiar to the wor- 
ship of Cybele, Venus-Ery-cina and the Syrian goddess. 
These debauched wretches constituted a world of people 
apart by themselves, and were for this very reason wholly 
devoted to the promoting of the ideas of the East. All the 
gods were there as well as the little arcane worships, the 
mysteries of every kind, expiations, purifications, a thick 
vapor of vice and remorse, of panic and of odious dreams. 
The flagellants of Atys surely were there, and perhaps 
already the unclean Taurobolia,* washing of blood. 
What power could equal that of Phoebe arriving there 
with the simple sentence, which dismisses and makes 
all those things useless? "Good news! . . . Sin is 
dead! ..." 

The other key powerful to open was this. Jesus, the 
Teacher, had said : " Render unto Caesar the things 
which are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are 
God's, "f Paul, the disciple, had said : " Let every soul 
be subject to the higher powers. Whosoever resists the 
power, resists the ordinance of God." " Pay ye tribute also 
to princes, for they are God's ministers, attending continu- 
ally upon this very thing. "J Peter had frankly said : " Be 
subject to your masters, even to the froward ones."§ 



* The Taurobolia or baptism of blood was one of the Mithraic ceremonies 
which spread over all Western Europe and into Northern Africa.— Ed. 
f Gospel according to Matthew, xvii. 21. 
% Epistle to the Romans, xiii. 
& First Catholic Epistle of Peter, ii. l8-2C. 



308 Bible of Humanity. 

The question is to obey not only de facto and in deeds, 
but also with the soul. The question is not to obey by 
making the Jewish reserve : " Through the transgressions 
of the people, their princes become many,"* and they are 
the scourge of God. No reserve. One must subdue 
one's self and obey in conscience ; serve willingly, and 
love — love Tiberius, love Nero. This is a new slavery, 
hollowed out under slavery ; this is a great and ingenious 
deepening of all the ancient servitudes, and which, in the 
Middle Ages and afterward, operated to transform all 
princes into zealous Christians. 

The great fact of the moment, the personal government 
of Caesar, free from the idea of magistracy ; of Caesar, ruler 
of the Law, and become the Law itself in the person of his 
procurator, received from the new tenet a marvellous sanc- 
tion. Must not Caesar have welcomed this voice from the 
East, this Messiah who enjoined that man should obey 
from his inmost heart ? Nero, on his accession to the 
throne, although still. docile to his Roman teachers, was 
already in an underhanded way surrounded by enfran- 
chised persons, who had been governing till that time ; 
persons of any kind, who amused his artistical imagina- 
tion, some of them being poets and declaimers, others 
charlatans and ministers of some god. Nero, on account 
of his vast disorderly imagination, was a natural prey 
for them. His head was full and bursting. He re- 
volved in his mind enormous things and in a thousand 
different ways. Ought he to be the Caesar of Rome and 
the Jurists, or the supreme artist, the emperor of poetry ? 
or rather the restorer of the genius of the East, a Mithras 
and a Messiah ? He himself did not yet know. 

He would be loved. Brought up by Seneca, a generous 
Stoic, who dined with his own slaves, Nero had embraced 
the cause of the enfranchised. He contemplated an im- 
mense Utopia — the abolition of taxes. This would have 

* Proverbs of Solomon, xxviii. 2. 



Ttiumph of Woman. 309 

been the realization of the Stoic ideal, as stated by Zeno : 
M Love is the safety of the commonwealth ! " 

But, oh ! how vague and obscure this word " Love " is ! 
Love without Justice, love of caprice and favoritism may 
become a hell, the scourge of the commonwealth, and by 
no means its safety. 

One of the greatest struggles which ever took place on 
earth is that which we may conjecture, and which doubt- 
less took place at this very moment in the Palace of Nero, 
and perhaps under his very eyes ; I mean the struggle 
between Woman and the Stoic. 

It has been already remarked that Woman in the first 
four centuries of the Christian Era (till the year 369) was 
a priest, the true Christian priest. It was her special 
prerogative to protect that faith, which issued forth from 
Woman. 

But, oh ! how different the part of the two adversaries 
is ! The Stoic reascends by the universal propensity of 
the world. And Woman goes down on it at her own ease. 
The Stoic commands effort, enjoins work to the exhausted 
and worn-out world, which teaching of his made him 
hated. . . . And oh ! how easily Phoebe could answer 
in a scornful manner: "The lily does neither work nor 
spin, and yet it is better dressed than Caesar." 

Jurists or Stoics, magistrates, philosophers, all, in asking 
of the world to be watchful, to live yet, were asking an 
enormous, unbearable thing, while the world, sickly as it 
was, settled itself down so well to go asleep ! How much 
better it liked the voice of the nurse, alluring to sleep, the 
sweet and voluptuous voice of woman, that said : " How 
sweet it is to die ! " 

To die, to be free from the bonds of the body — what a 
happy prospect ! ( Who will deliver me from the ties of 
this body ?)* The body means work, the care of taxes, 
the burden of the law. The body is the militia, the war- 

* Epistle to the Romans, vii. 24. 



310 Bible of Humanity, 

fare against barbarians, the exile to the frozen Rhine, the 
defence of the Roman frontiers. 

On this point the Jurist was strong. He thought to 
stop the Christian woman, and to perplex her. But she 
answered with a smile: "What! To thrust back our 
Northern brothers, who come to seek salvation ? It 
would be much better to invite them, to open them our 
doors, to overthrow from their foundation the walls of our 
cities. ..." 

But the Empire, but our laws, our arts ? — 

What are the arts good for ? — 

But our sacred country, the City, this vast harmony of 
wisdom and peace ? — 

There is no peace here below. There is no City but 
the heavenly one. 

Down, thou vain Wisdom ! Reason, cast down thy 
eyes ! make an apology both of you before the Fool- 
ishness of God. . . . Justice and the Civil Law, thou art 
the enemy. I know thee, O proud one ; thou haughty 
mother of human virtues, come down from thy prae- 
torium. . . . The sinner already sits higher than thy 
false just persons. His sin is the field where Grace 
triumphs. 

Oh ! what mockery Phcebe could make, and what con- 
tempt she must have had of the Julian law, which was an 
official glorification of marriage ! * What ! to bind yet 
one's self by vow, to generate beings for a world, which 
must die to-morrow, to perpetuate this mean thing — the 
body — which God wishes to abolish ! Immortal thanks 
are due to him that the desert is becoming a fact and it 
enlarges itself. In many provinces, the Empire is already 
expurgated. Let some other scourge be applied, and all 

* People quoted a terrible sentence of Jesus against marriage. Salome 
said to Jesus : '* How long will people die ? " — " How long will you bring 
forth ?" — " Ah," she answered, " I have done well in not having children ! " 
— " Salome, Salome ! eat of anything," said he, " but do not eat the bitter 
herb." — Clement of Alexandria, Stromata III., 345. 



Triumph of Woman. 311 

will be released. Husbands, fly from your wives 

Let everybody go away and live isolated. " So much the 
more speedily will the world come to an end, and the City 
of God be filled up."* 

Death is the supreme argument, and to it there is no 
reply. Phoebe preaches her cause on the sepulchre of a 
hundred nations, whose gods, cold already in the Pan- 
theon, and with empty eyes, were, in the apparent strug- 
gle, easy fighters for this priestess of death. If they had 
been able to answer, they would perhaps have said, that 
the new faith, triumphing through Woman, followed, in 
spite of Paul himself, the way of the old. Paul had wished 
her to be vailed, silent, and dependent. I see her at the 
altar preaching and prophesying, teaching man, telling 
him of God — nay, making a god for him. A powerful and 
charming contrivance, quite natural after all, which the 
ancient worships had not abused. The gloomy Iphigenia, 
the foaming Sibyl, had less charms than terror. The 
Vestal, obedient and silent, was a statue. The priestess of 
the new faith was a living woman, she spoke and officiated ; 
raised above the people, she blessed them and prayed for 
them ; she was their voice to the throne of Jesus. 

As long as the goddesses of art, production of the 
Greek chisel, were not overthrown, people, during four 
centuries, opposed to their dead beauty, life itself, the 
visible Wisdom, the pontificate of Woman. \ The silent 

* 1 Augustine. 

f Like any other priest [presbyter], woman was solemnly consecrated, and 
received the Holy Ghost by the laying on of hands. {Council of Chalcedonia, 
the fourth Oecumenical.) The Council of Laodicea, in the year 366 or 369, 
forbade her to be a priestess. (Chapter XII. Collection of Denys the Little, 
Mayence, 1525. Labbe and Mansi have omitted this council.) The Coun- 
cil of Carthage, in 391, forbade her to catechize, to baptize, or even to study, 
except with her husband. Till that time she used to preside, to preach, to 
confer orders, to officiate. Atton remarks that she at that time was worthy 
of doing all that "for the instruction she had received in the heathen times." 
It is easily conceived what must have been the power of woman in those high 
functions which made her almost divine, while she was about thirty years old, 
and still beautiful, eloquent and dexterous, as women are in Greece and in 



312 Bible of Human ity. 

Ceres could not struggle much when the new Ceres en- 
chanted the ancient agapce, and administered the sacred 
bread. Pallas, the austere virgin, must have yielded 
altogether when Magdalene made the altar dramatic and 
wetted it with her tears. 

What did she say to the dying world? . . . " Let us 
die together ! " A tender sentence of a sister, which was 
very sure to be listened to ! What would, however, become 
of the world, if everybody remained always suspended on 
this sentence, not able any longer either to live on or to 
die altogether ? 

the East ! Enthroned at the altar, admired and the beloved of everybody, she 
possessed a true power and, surely, the most complete of all. The gloomy 
Tertullian was indignant against her. The fierce Athanasius, over- 
excited about Egyptian monachism, feared the too sensible effect of the mo- 
ment in which she consecrated and made the marriage of heaven and earth, 
and in which all communicated with her and received the Sacrament from her 
gentle hand. If she consecrated, he wished her to do it with closed doors and 
for herself alone. But often she had not the strength thus to shut herself up 
altogether. The door was not shut very strongly ; the zealots, who were 
without, took her by surprise at the decisive moment, when she was in a 
touching trouble of modesty and holiness. Then Athanasius in a new fury 
forbade her to allow herself to be taken by surprise, and he forbade her 
also to wash herself, hoping thus to make her repulsive. By a more refined, 
more exalted scrupulousness, the sect of the Callydicians feared that the love 
of Jesus might too much agitate the priestess, and that she might wander in 
the dreams of the spiritual marriage ; and therefore, among them she was a 
friestess, but o?tly of Mary. In the West, women, much more ignorant, 
never exercised the priesthood, but only the deaconship, or the material cares 
of the Church. In the fifth century three Western councils and two popes 
decidedly removed woman from the ministration of holy things. 



Period of Universal Weakness. 313 



CHAPTER IX. 

PERIOD OF UNIVERSAL WEAKNESS— THE CRUSHING OF 
THE MIDDLE AGES. 

LET us suppose that on a fine morning the observatory 
and the Academy of Sciences, which are our popes, inform 
us that on such a month, and on such a day, the earth 
will pass across a comet of igneous aerolites, a shower of 
iron and of fire. Great stupor. At first people will 
doubt. But the event is certain, calculated, demonstrated. 
All activity, all pleasure, all work stops. People cross 
their arms. The event, however, delays ; the astronomer 
has mistaken the year. No matter. No work begins 
again. The languor of the people is the same. Every- 
body had settled himself down for that. 

Death ! there is nothing more dear than death to him 
who has no longer any part in active life. In the early 
Christian times, the expectation of death simplified 
everything. A silence, a strange calm of all human pas- 
sions took place. Law-suits ceased. Mine and thine be- 
came indifferent. People hardly contended over that 
which might perish to-morrow.* Everything was com- 

* People willingly got rid of their slaves, under the belief that the judg- 
ment was so near at hand, and that everything was soon to come to an end. 
Christianity had, by no means, abolished slavery. The text of Saint Paul 
(Galatians iii. 28), which Walton and many others have quoted, has 
nothing to do with it. DESPOIS has conclusively shown this in his articles 
of impregnable strength, and to which no answer has been made. (Avenir, 2, 
16, 23, Decern. 1855.) Bossuet, on this point, agrees with Despois: 
" To condemn slavery is to condemn the Holy Ghost." {Warning to Pro- 
testants.) Despois has also, in support of his reasoning, the teaching of the 
Ecclesiastical seminaries of our own days, which teaching "condemns the 
negro who escapes from his master." (Bouvier, Bis A. of Mans, 6th edi- 
tion, VI., 22-25.) Tne Koran, on the contrary, declares free the slave who 
embraces Islamism. It says: " He who enfranchises a man, frees himself 
from the penances of this life, and from eternal punishment." 



314 Bible of Humanity, 

mon between brothers and sisters. Sex was forgotten. 
The very wife was no more than a sister. The hearth 
was cold and its fires extinguished. 

Death was hoped for. Oh ! that it would come speed- 
ily ! Ignatius says : " I am hungry of it, I am thirsty for 
it." 

Nature was the curse. Nature was damnation. In the 
fourth chapter of Genesis, it is stated that " it repented 
the Lord that he had made man on the earth." 

To leave nature soon, " to depart as soon as possible," 
says Tertullian, "is the true object of man."* Saint 
Cyprian made vows for plague and famine. f He who has 
children, says Tertullian, must pray to God " to the end 
that they may depart from this impious world." This is 
just what Saint Hilarius did for his daughter, and his 
prayer was answered. Afterward he prayed for the 
eternal departure of his wife, and he received this grace 
also 4 

But how continue life, its duties, its actions, which are 
necessary even if it has to last one day ? How obtain 
some indispensable action from this great sluggish people ? 
And yet, if they cannot be brought to act, the world infal- 
libly must come to an end. At least, if somebody could 
devise for such sick persons a passion, or even a vice ! 
They could then be saved. But what can be done ? 
What can be drawn out from the distressing perfection of 
those pale lovers of death, who smile and give thanks 
when they are struck ? 

We see nowadays in India the feeblest men, who are 
beaten with impunity ; we see timid women, old women 
who are at their last gasp, throw themselves under the 
wheels of the car of Jagernat, which slowly runs over 
them, and yet such horrible torture does not draw out of 
them a sigh. They are unable to do the least action. 
Nothing is more usual, especially at the outset of great 

* Adversics Gentes, v. 2. \ Ad Dem. % Fortunatus. 



Period of Universal Weakness. 315 

religious epidemics, than this hunger after death, this facil- 
ity of undergoing martyrdom, this joy of deliverance. On 
this point the most despicable, the humblest man has 
yet this happiness of pride, namely, that of destroying, of 
trampling under foot order and Law, and of being a Law 
to himself. 

The example was contagious. A few Christians per- 
ished.* But immense masses that did not imitate their 
martyrdom, imitated their refusal to bear the burden of 
civil life, and especially the military service.-)* The latter, 
hard as it is in itself, was harder still on account of the 
immense journeys of the legions — from the river Seine to 
the Euphrates — and hardest of all things on account of 
the work of masons and mechanics, which the legions had 
to do, and the wretchedness of their pay, made less by the 
increase of price of everything. Tacitus has described all 
this in a masterly way. What did the soldier do ? He 
made war against the Empire itself, he created a Caesar, 
who augmented the pay, but it soon again became insuffi- 
cient. At last, disheartened, he abandoned the Rhine and 
the Danube to take care of themselves, if they could, and 
threw away his sword, saying : ■" I am a Christian." 

Then the barbarians passed over. They were disorderly 
multitudes — of whom Marius and Tiberius in their day 
had made great slaughter — and confused masses of women, 
children, oxen, chariots, than which nothing was easier to 
arrest. And to stop them was also the wisest thing. 
Whatever Tacitus in his Germania (which is nothing but 
a novel) may have said ; whatever our extravagant Tento- 
maniacs may have added to what he said, the barbarians 
carried into the Empire only disorder and ruin. The best 
the Romans could do was to make a choice of them, to 



* Dodvvell : Fewness of Martyrs. Ruinart himself acknowledges 
that the number of martyrs has been exaggerated. 

f The text is precise : "All they that take the sword shall perish with the 
sword." (Matthew xxvi. 52.) Tertullian expressly enjoins the soldier 
to desert. LACTANTIUS forbids even the sea-service and commerce. 



3 1 6 Bible of Human ity. 

scatter them among the provinces, and thus to make them 
Romans. But to open the barriers, and foolishly to fra- 
ternize with them, to admit them by tribes, was the same 
as to accept chaos. The tall, insipid-looking young fel- 
lows were very, very far from being able to understand 
the Roman life. They broke everything, and turned 
everything topsy-turvy. And then, those men who ap- 
peared very strong were too effeminate, and they melted 
as snow at the heat of the South, at vices and excesses. 
Of their corruption, there remained only a mire, into 
which the Empire stuck fast, every day falling lower and 
lower, instead of being regenerated. 

The few Italians and Greeks who yet remained, Celtica 
and Spain, the hard, indestructible races of Lyguria and 
Dalmatia, maintained to the Empire, even in its depopula- 
tion, some resources more real indeed. Was there no 
genius in the nation, which at that time gave to the world 
Tacitus, Juvenal, and Marcus- Aurelius ; Gaius, and Ul- 
pian teachers of jurisprudence, and the oracle of it, 
the great Papinianus ? It could then have been held 
for certain that if, on the one hand, the world was 
falling off since Aristotle and Hippocrates, it was raising 
itself on the other hand by Equity and the comprehension 
of Justice. 

The vulgar belief " that the Empire was dying without 
remedy " had its origin in the idea which rashly con- 
founds the life of nations with that of an individual. 
Nothing, however, is more different. Nations have in 
their constitutive elements a principle of renovation, which 
the individual has not. But in order to live again, one 
must believe in life; in order to conquer, one must be- 
lieve in victory. What can we do with persons who have 
been struck at heart ? " What is left to you ? " " My- 
self," answered Medea. If self remain, that is all. But 
if it does not remain ? if it is shaken and sickly ? To 
believe that one is dying, and to say so, is to have died 
already. 



Period of Universal Weakness. 317 

The great colonies of Trajan, which were so strong and 
so durable— one of them of six millions of souls existing 
still in Roumania and Transylvania— appeared to consoli- 
date the Empire. But neither the great military chief, 
nor the greatest of jurists were sufficient for the conditions 
of the minds. The Eastern enervation was daily gaining 
ground, as well as its effeminate gods, the feverish malady 
of Syria and Phrygia. The Caesars were compelled to 
imitate their rivals, the kings of Parthia, who were Sun- 
kings, as the ancient Phra of Egypt, the Nobis of Babel, 
and the Mithrases of Iran. The Greeks of Bactriana, and 
the unconquerable Mithridates, the immortal Mithra of 
the kingdom of Pontus Euxinus, had borne that title. 

Such a thing seemed foolishness at first. But Nero was 
thinking on it, and it was this that undoubtedly made him 
cruel toward the Christians, and their Anti-Christ.* The 
childish Elagabalus, the little pontiff of Syria, tried it, and 
lost himself. Both of them were very unclean, effeminates 
and grotesque Adonises, and wonderfully ridiculous. 
Their foolishness, however, was imitated by the wise and 
brave Aurelian when the highest necessities compelled 
him. He was victorious in twenty battles, and proclaimed 
himself an incarnation of tJie Sun-god. 

Every dying god had declared himself a Sun, Serapis, 
Atys, Adonis, and Bacchus ; everything came to an end 
that way. The Empire, in its decrepitude, looked toward 
the sun for a little warmth. And for a moment people 
thought to make Mithras — the invincible Sun — the god of 
the armies, the worship of the Roman legions. f 

Mithras had derived great renown from Mithridates, 
the last enemy of Rome, and from the mysterious empire 
which Pompey destroyed, namely, from the association 
of pirates, who for a while were masters of the whole 
Mediterranean. This association was a Mithraic one, 
the secret of which has never been wholly unfolded. 

* See Reville on the Apocalypse. 

\ See the texts collected in Preller's Romish Mythology, 1858. 



3 1 8 Bible of Human ity. 

What we know precisely about it is, that among those 
desperadoes, Mithras was worshipped as energy, the 
solar and human energy. Their initiation to the military 
service of Mithras was performed in caves. The god was 
represented to be born in gloomy caves, as a young and 
strong man, dazzling with splendor, throwing down and 
killing a bull. The pirates very ingeniously adopted, for 
the ordinary representation of Mithras, a beautiful Greek 
statue of a virgin (it is Victory) killing the enormous 
beast. But they put on her head the Phrygian cap, made 
of her a young Atys, who, however, was not mutilated, 
but, on the contrary, had an unfailing arm, and struck 
down the bull at one blow. 

The degrees of the initiation were as follows : Soldiers, 
Lions, Scouts of the Sun, to run over the world sword in 
hand. A sword and a crown were offered to the novice, and 
he took only the sword, saying : " Mithras is my crown ; 
I will be a king of energy." 

That had a very great success in the legions. It was 
believed that the blood of the bull, issuing forth red and 
warm from it, and falling upon the enervated individual, 
poured forth on him its strength and even its amorous 
valor. Mithraism for a while was the genuine religion 
of the Empire. Constantine himself hesitated to have 
a hand in it. 

Its effect did not last long. Mithras himself, struck as 
he was, far from healing others, languished and decayed. 
Though he was the Sun, though he was Victory, he also, 
like many others, became a penitent god. 

In order to understand well the nothingness of this 
epoch, and to value its fall, it is enough to consider 'the pale 
literature of that time, which is like the breath of one who 
dies, an unmeaning mess of fables and vague words ; a 
deep poverty and extreme impotency. Everything was 
languid, soft, old — and, what is worse, bombastic, swollen 
with air and wind, and strangely exaggerated. 

There is nothing in any language to be compared with 



Period of Universal Weakness. 319 

those strange letters, in which Saint Jerome, while advis- 
ing a Christian virgin to embrace religious celibacy, 
related his temptations, the fury of his own old desires. 
As a compensation for this, there is nothing so cold and 
tame as the narrations of martyrs, which are indeed feeble 
productions for so glowing a subject. But the best of all 
that literature is the universal and popular hand-book, 
the insipid Shepherd of Hennas, a libretto of the small 
mysteries into which the novices were admitted, and 
which Ireneus, Clement, Athanasius, Jerome, Eusebius, 
and many others quoted and admired during two or three 
centuries. That book was in vogue as long as women 
were priests, probably because it exhibits many parts for 
young and old women, in which they could at leisure dis- 
play their apostolic graces. 

It was a sad production, too like those pale eggs 
which the male has not fecundated. And yet, who will 
believe it ? it was not woman's fault. Her softness and 
her gracefulness, her charming faults are absent. Lo ! 
what it is to believe that people can do without love, 
without child, without maternity, that which is a powerful 
initiation ! The idea of the child scarcely appears in 
the Jewish monuments, except the pride of succession, 
and appears not at all in the Christian monuments. Jesus 
seems to be a child and he is not. He preaches. His 
mother dares not interpose. As for her, he is fruit- 
less, neither suckled nor brought up. What follows 
of all this ? Woman is sad and dry, an ungraceful and 
pitiful-looking being. The impotency of man is un- 
doubtedly lamentable. But an impotent, atrophied woman 
is a dry fruit. Her impotency is worse than death, it is 
desolation ! 

Look likewise at the silly appearance, the idiotish face 
of those Northern people who go to this school. They 
are Ostrogoths and Visigoths, who have become a by- 
word for decrepit foolishness. Look at them on the 
benches of the old school of Hermas, reciting "niusa, 



320 Bible of Huma7iity. 

a muse." Behind them comes another, Attila, a cruel 
teacher, with his iron rod. 

It is to be observed that the kings of the Goths have 
still the countenance of men in comparison with the sons 
of Dagobert who came afterward. The same is to be 
said of their chronicles in comparison with those of Fre- 
degaire, who, however, was better than the Carlovingian 
friars, for the latter were dumb beasts who could scarcely 
lisp and bleat out words. 

In the terrible voyage of Kane to the polar seas, noth- 
ing strikes the reader so much as to see Newfoundland 
dogs or Esquimaus "that were very wise and strong- 
minded " becoming mad through the excruciating severity 
of the cold. The same sadness, the same dismay seizes 
me, if I may make use of such expressions, at seeing in 
the Christian legends that the lion, the dog, and the birds, 
formerly so wise, have become imbecile. The beasts are 
silly. The animal which in India was the friend of Rama, 
and which in Persia had its celestial, winged genius,* is a 
ridiculous penitent with Saint Antony, Saint Macarius, 
etc. The lion becomes a lay brother of the hermit, and 
carries his baggage. The hyena listens to his preaching 
and promises to steal no more. 

Illusive legends. In the Christian mind, the animal is 
suspicious, the beast seems to be a mask. The velus, an 
inauspicious name, which the Jews give to animals, are 
dumb devils. And nature becomes demoniac. The tree, 
with its gloomy foliage, is full of terror and snares. Is 
it not the tree, that guilty one, to which the serpent 
twisted itself in order to seduce, to deceive Eve, and to 
ruin mankind ? If it be not the serpent now on the tree, 

* The City of Beasts, their grandeur and their decline, is a beautiful subject. 
Eugenius Noel, a writer of a very charming mind, has found out such a 
title, and he alone can write a book on it. It contains an immense part of 
human affairs. It is evident by the Avesta that mankind has lived only 
through the alliance of the dog against the lion. The dread of the lion brings 
people together. Where he does not exist people live isolated. The lion 
made society. 



Period of Universal Weakness. 321 

it is the bird, it is the nightingale (a demon of melody) 
which sings still on it to trouble and to lead human 
hearts astray. Through those enchanted trees the magic 
of the desert was performed ; the cloud gathered, and 
the rain poured down ; hence, flowers and fruits, and all 
the temptations of man. Down ! O fatal trees! Let the 
plain be spread, rugged, naked, and desolate ! The earth 
has made love for a long time ; let it now do penance.* 

Thus began here below that strange phenomenon — the 
hatred of creation, and persecution, the exile of God the 
Father. The Word alone reigned. Until the year 1200 
there was not an altar, there was not a church dedicated 
to the Father, there was not even a symbol which called 
him to mind. It was not the fault of man that (oh ! enor- 
mous thing ! ) God was not banished from nature, from 
the great church, of which he is the life, the soul that is 
unceasingly born of him. 

Father ! It is a dear, sacred word, the love of the 
ancient world. The household had in it its firm support, 
its noble genius ; the home had in it its solidity. Every- 
thing wavered \\\ the Middle Ages. The husband, was 
he the husband ? the father, was he the father? I do not 
know. The ideal and mystic family, which was shaped 
according to the legend, has its authority elsewhere. 
There was no head of the family. There was no father 

* The three peoples of the Book, the Jewish people, and their two offshoots, 
the Christian and the Mohammedan (studying the Word and neglecting life, rich 
in sentences and poor in works), have forgotten the Earth, the Mother Earth. 
Oh ! what an impiety ! Look at the nakedness of the old Greco-Byzantine 
world. Look at the desert of Castile, rugged, salt, unpleasant. Look at 
all the canals of India neglected by the English. Persia, once the Paradise 
of God, what is she now ? A Mohammedan sepulchre. From Judea to 
Tunis and Morocco, and on the other hand from Athens to Genoa, all those 
bald summits which look from on high into the Mediterranean have lost 
their forests, their crown of cultivation. And will those forests adorn those 
summits again? Never. If the ancient gods, and the active and strong 
peoples, in whose time those shores were blossoming, should to-day rise from 
their graves, they would say : " O gloomy .peoples of the Book, of grammars, 
of words, and of vain subtleties, what have ye made of Nature ? " 
21 



322 Bible of Humanity, 

in the ancient meaning of the word. A third person now 
assumed this name, which formerly meant a creator, a 
generator. The father said to him: " My Father!" 
What is he then in his own house ? 

Let us put aside the idea of adultery, which, however, 
recurs everywhere in the Middle Ages. Let us suppose 
that the family is respected, pure, and holy. The fact is 
always sad. It is the scorn of the man, it is the dispar- 
agement of the husband. As to him, his wife is a virgin. 
For her soul is elsewhere, and while she gives all, she 
gives nothing. Her ideal is another. If you see that she 
has become a mother, it is because she has conceived of 
the Spirit. The son belongs to her. And to her hus- 
band ? No. Behold then the household made at the 
image of the external society. The mother and her son 
constituted one people, the husband an inferior people. 
He was the serf, the beast. The crushing of the world was 
here reproduced in the very shelter where the unhappy 
man would have wished to revive his wretched heart. 

Who is that child that grows up apace and flourishes 
with a precocious gracefulness under the complaisant eye 
of his mother? The woman's husband himself is proud of 
him, and prefers him to all other boys. And yet how he 
differs from him ! One feels that too strongly at intervals. 
Oh ! bitter fluctuation ! Oh ! incurable sadness ! He 
will be uncertain whether he may love him or not. In the 
meanwhile he loves him. But he has no feeling of secu- 
rity. There is no complete and true joy for him. He has 
lost his smile, and he will never recover it on earth. 

In the Primitive Gospel {Protoevangeliinn), a book quo- 
ted by the first Fathers, the touching figure of Joseph has 
been set down, namely, his compassionate goodness, as 
well as his deep chagrin and his tears. 

The Gospel of the Carpenter is much more explicit. It 
is a serious and artless book, which people have done 
their best to destroy. It has been recovered in an Ara- 
bian translation. But it is not an Arabian book, for it has 



Period of Universal Weakness. 323 

none of the silly flowers of Arabian literature. It is a 
Greek or a Hebrew book. This poor little book has, 
with a prophetic vigor, pictured in Joseph and in Jesus 
the whole situation of the thousand years that followed— 
the cruel plague of the family. 

Joseph has, from the beginning, been worthy of admi- 
ration for his behavior toward the orphan girl, harshly re- 
jected by the priests of the Temple, who sent her away, 
while she was compromised and poor. Joseph, scarcely 
engaged and simply betrothed, opened his arms to her 
and saved her. He was none the less sad, however, and 
he remained so through his life. On his death-bed, it 
went still worse with him. His soul, weakened by cha- 
grins, troubled itself and despaired. He cried over his 
destiny, cursed his birth-day, believed that his mother 
conceived him in a day of bad desire, according to the 
idea of the Psalmist, and at last he said: "Woe to my 
body ! and woe to my soul ! I feel that my soul is far 
from God ! " What a bitter cry ! He has had neither 
earth nor heaven. He has lived near her, with her, and 
without her. And, at the end of such a gloomy life, he 
saw " the /ions of hell." He was afraid of Jesus himself 
on account of the bad thoughts which he had entertained 
about Jesus's mother. But he w r as wrong in this. Jesus 
had a compassionate heart, and his tears flew copiously to 
calm and reassure him, driving away from him the terrors 
of death. " Be not afraid, nothing of thee will die ! Thy 
very body will remain, it will not be dissolved, and it will 
be intact till the great Feast of a thousand years." 

Thus, from the earliest Christian times, was described 
in a wonderful manner what was to come, and to be re- 
peated everywhere. That which, however, was not fore- 
seen was that, in this hell, the victims of marriage would 
embitter their griefs by making sport of each other. The 
cruel songs of the Christmas-carols follow them through , 
the whole of the Middle Ages. They must laugh at those 
songs, and sing them, and be merry. To be sad is al- 



324 Bible of Humanity. 

lowed to nobody. And it is the saddest married man 
who sings, that he may avoid being the laughing-stock of 
the party. That follows him everywhere. Wherever he 
turns himself, either at the evening songs, the Mysteries 
which are performed at the doors of churches, or the 
Mysteries figured in stone, the same legend follows him 
always and everywhere. To the songs of the Christmas- 
carols succeeds the novel, which like a sweetish diluting 
makes the legend worldly. A whole literature spreads 
and stirs up the poison, pouring it in the wound, giving 
to the heart nothing but the sharp cut of doubt on the 
dearest thing . . . love ! 

There will be at least always subsisting the love of the 
child to the mother. " In this worship, is not the child 
the beloved object ?" He, who thinks so, is wrong. 

Even among the Jews the family relation was hard- 
hearted. "Withhold not correction from thy child." 
" Beat him constantly." * " Never smile to thy daughter, 
and keep her body pure." f What a strange and shock- 
ing commandment ! It will be handed to the casuists so 
much the better. And they will take hold of it, and make 
shameful commentaries. One of these commentaries 
prohibits the mother to look at her son ! 

What is, then, this child ? Flesh, incarnated sin. The 
more beautiful the child, the more abundant the blending 
of lilies and roses on its cheek and brow, the more it 
represents love, the moment of love, in which Nature — 
the condemned one — spoke. Alas ! on her knees, in her 
arms, over her breast what does she hold, but Sin ? . . . 
Thus, how sad and timid she is ? Will she dare love ? 
Yes and no. ... If she should love too much ? . . . 
Where must her love stop ? Oh ! cruel doctrines, which 
breaking the links of home, and making love a bitter 
thing, freeze even maternal affection. 

* Proverbs of Solomon xiii. 24; xxxiii. 13; xxix. 15; and Ecclesiasticus tuxx. 

If 9» 10. 

f Ecclesiasticus vii. 26, 



Period of Universal Weakness. 325 

" Therefore, no love but in God. God loved so much 
the world. . . . He can require all, since he has given all, 
his Son ! " Enormous sacrifice through which the Gospel 
appeared as infinite Forgiveness, and showed sin dead, jus- 
tice impossible, hell vanquished and extinguished. How 
is it, then, that still subsists the barbarous old idea, Pre- 
destination, which teaches that there are people con- 
demned before their birth, and created for hell-fire ? This 
disheartening idea hovers vaguely here and there over the 
Old Testament ; but it stands out in bold presence in the 
Gospels, as if in red lightning on a dark background.* In 
the writings of Saint Paul it becomes a man in the vigor of 
his youth, and in the works of Saint Augustin, a hangman. 

Oh ! how terrible Love is ! On the door of hell, ac- 
cording to Dante, there is the following inscription : 
" Love made me." The fury and ferocity of Augustin 
has its foundation in Love. He, with his African nature, 
in his ardor toward God, blamed and condemned the 
Greek Fathers, who entertained doubts about an everlast- 
ing hell, and dared believe that the blessed, in looking at 
the reprobate, could feel pity.f 

* " Unto you it has been given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of 
heaven. To them it has not been given." {Matthew. See also John xii. 
40.) But why speak by parables ? " That seeing they may see, and not per- 
ceive ; and hearing they may hear, and not understand" {Mark iv. 12; 
Luke viii. 10) ; and Mark adds ; " Lest at any time they should be converted, 
and their sins should be forgiven them." (Mark iv. 12.) What is stranger 
still is that according to the old Jewish spirit " God tempts man.'''' (Lead us 
not into temptation.) I wish I were mistaken. Perhaps I have not under- 
stood well ! Is there anything more cruel than this to the heart? 

f The terrible barrenness of the Middle Ages has passed judgment on these 
doctrines. It seems as though they had been wasted by fire. How many 
centuries in vain ! A patient erudition finds out this and that. But, truly, 
how can we desist from blushing at it ? What ! so few things in a thousand 
years ! A thousand years ! a thousand years ! I say, and for a society of so 
many peoples and so many kingdoms ! How they go slowly till 1200 ! . . . 
And after 1200 their condition is more lamentable, for they can neither live 
nor die. During six hundred years, with so many resources, they cannot 
create or institute anything which is not hatred and police supervision. In 
1200 the Orders of Mendicants, their burning charity, and the worship of Mary. 



326 Bible of Humanity. 

And who is the reprobate ? Why, everybody. It is 
evident in Saint Augustin that in this doctrine of Love, 
the loved is undiscoverable, the chosen is rare, almost 
impossible. . . . Good gracious ! What in the Law 
could have been harsher than this ? Give back to me 
Justice. With her I might have had at least some ex- 
tenuating circumstances. But I have none under the dis- 
pensation of Grace. My lot is fixed beforehand. Oh ! 
release me from Love ! 

" If you have sometimes travelled among mountains, 
you may perhaps have observed the same spectacle which 
I once met with. 

" From among a confused heap of rocks piled together, 
amid a landscape diversified with trees and verdure, 
towered a gigantic peak. That object, black, bare, and 
solitary, was but too evidently thrown up from the deep 
bowels of the earth. It was enlivened by no verdure ; no 
season changed its aspect; the very birds would hardly 
venture to alight on it, as though they feared to singe their 
wings by touching the mass which had been projected 
from the earth's central fire. That gloomy evidence of 
the throes of the interior world seemed still to muse over 
the scene, regardless of surrounding objects, without ever 
rousing from its savage melancholy. 

" What were then the subterraneous revolutions of the 
earth, what incalculable powers combated in its bosom, for 
that mass, disturbing mountains, piercing through rocks, 
shattering beds of marble, to burst forth to the surface ! 
What convulsions, what agony forced from the entrails of 
the globe that prodigious groan ! 

" I sat down, and from my eyes tears of anguish, slow 

And all this was a new kind of police, (heaven help us) the police of the In- 
quisition. , About the year 1500 the crusade of Ignatius, knighthood, and 
yet penalty, a net of infinite intrigues. In our days, Saint Vincent de Paul, 
a philanthropic devotee. But the Public and the State have seen in it noth- 
ing but police still. 



Period of Universal Weak?iess. 327 

and painful, began to flow. Nature had but too well 
reminded me of history. That chaos of mountain-heaps 
oppressed me with the same weight which had crushed 
the heart of man throughout the Middle Ages, and in that 
desolate peak, which from her inmost bowels the earth 
had hurled towards heaven, I saw pictured the despair 
and the cry of the human race. 

"That Justice should have borne for a thousand years 
that mountain of dogma upon her heart, and, crushed 
beneath its weight, have counted the hours, the days, the 
years— so many long years— is, for him who knows it, a 
source of eternal tears. 

" My very heart bled in contemplating the long resig- 
nation, the meekness, the patience, and the efforts of 
humanity to love that world of hate and malediction under 
which it was crushed. 

" When man, resigning liberty and justice, as something 
useless, entrusted himself blindly to the hands of Grace, 
and saw it becoming concentrated on an imperceptible 
point — that is to say, the privileged, the elect — and saw 
all other beings, whether on earth or under the earth, 
lost for eternity, you would suppose there arose every- 
where a howl of blasphemy ! No, only a groan. 

14 And these affecting words : ' If thou wilt that I be 
damned, thy will be done, O Lord ! ' 

11 Then, peaceful, submissive, and resigned, they folded 
themselves in the shroud of damnation. 

" And yet, what a constant temptation to despair and 
doubt ! How bondage here below was, with all its mis- 
eries, the beginning, the foretaste of eternal damnation ! 
First a life of suffering ; next, for consolation, hell ! 
Damned beforehand ! Then, wherefore those comedies 
of Judgment represented in the church-porches ! Is it not 
barbarous to keep in uncertainty, in dreadful anxiety, ever 
suspended over the abyss, him, who, before his birth, is 
adjudged to the bottomless pit, is due to it, and belongs 
to it? 



'328 Bible of Humanity. 

"Before his birth! — the infant, the innocent, created 
expressly for hell ! Nay, did I say the innocent ? This 
is the horror of the system ; there is innocence no more. 
I know not, but I boldly and unhesitatingly affirm this to 
be the insoluble knot at which the human soul had stopped 
short, and patience was staggered. 

" The infant damned ! This is a deep, frightful wound 
to the maternal heart ! In exploring its depths, we find 
there much more than the terrors of death. 

" Thence was it, believe me, that the first sigh arose of 
protestation ? No ! And yet, unknown to the timid heart 
of woman, whence it escaped, there was a terrible But in 
that humble, low, agonizing groan. 

" So low, but so heart-rending ! The man who heard 
it at night slept no more on that night, nor for many a 
night after. And in the morning, before daylight, he went 
to his furrow, and there found many things were changed. 
He found the valley and the field of labor lower, much 
lower — deep, like a sepulchre ; and the two towers in the 
horizon more lofty — more gloomy and heavy ; gloomy the 
church-steeple, and dismal the feudal donjon. And then 
he began to comprehend the sounds of the two bells. The 
church-bell murmured Ever ; that of the donjon, Never. 
But, at the same time, a mighty voice spoke louder in his 
heart. That voice said, One day. And that was the 
voice of God ! 

" One day Justice shall return ! Leave those idle bells ; 
let them prate to the wind. Be not alarmed with thy 
doubt. That doubt is already faith. Believe, and hope ! 
Right, though postponed, shall have its advent ; it will 
come to sit in judgment on the dogma and on the world. 
And that day of Judgment will be called the Revolu- 
tion." * 



*MlCHELET: History of the French Revolution, ist vol. Introduction, 
p. xli. (January 31, 1847.) Prof. C. Cocks' translation. London, 1848. 



Period of Universal Weakness. 329 



CONCLUSION. 

I had wished that this sacred book, which really contains 
nothing that is originally mine, but is the utterance of the 
soul of mankind, might not exhibit a single word of criti- 
cism, but that all in it might be words of blessing. 

And yet in the last chapters the spirit of criticism seized 
us again. It is not our fault. And, indeed, how to speak 
of modern thought, of its happy agreement with the 
remotest antiquity, without explaining the long delays, 
the halt of sterility which we underwent in the Middle 
Ages ? 

We undergo it still. To speak the truth, the -delay, 
the stop occurs again too often. At intervals we lag. 
In spite of the immense powers we have, we seem out 
of breath at every step. Why? The reason is evident: 
we drag after us a dead thing, which is so much the more 
heavier. If it were our own skin we could manage to get 
rid of it, as the serpent does. Many shake themselves 
vigorously. But the evil is at the bottom. 

It is in our friends as well as in our enemies. Each of 
us is bound inwardly by a million of threads — remem- 
brances, habits, education, affections. Great men are 
bound as well as others. Even the imagination which 
thinks to be free and a queen has its interior servitudes, 
by fluttering about from Equity to Grace. The very 
lively and so strongly concentrated sensibility of artists 
feels so much the less the evils of men. Dante appears to 
have known nothing of the great Albijenses terror, of the 
eclipse of a world, of the appalling fact which in the 
year 1300 opened the way to the worship of Satan. He 
raises his standard, not in the eternal Gospel (the high con- 
ception of this epoch), but in the past, in Saint Thomas. 
Shakespere, the king of magicians, wanders from heaven 
to hell. But the earth ? his own epoch ? Behind the 
arras he feels only Polonius, but not the black mole which 



33° Bible of Humanity. 

prepares Thirty years' war and the death of ten millions 
of men. Rousseau heedlessly hurls a century of reaction 
by a sentence of his Emilins. 

Some geniuses in our time (who, I think, will not blush 
to find themselves ranged in such high society) believe 
that they are able to reconcile the irreconcilable. Either 
through compassion, kind heart, or through old habits, they 
keep a shred of the past. The tender remembrance of 
their mothers, the thoughts of the cradle, and, perhaps, the 
floating image of some good old preceptor, all these things 
stand before their eyes and conceal from them the world, 
the immensity of evils indefinitely prolonged, the Spiel- 
bergs y and the Siberias — I mean to say the moral Siberias, 
the barrenness, the progressive coolness which is going on 
at this very moment. 

It is necessary to wheel about, and eagerly, frankly, to 
turn our back to the Middle Ages, to that morbid past, 
which, even when it does not act, exercises a terrible in- 
fluence through the contagion of death. We need neither 
to fight nor to criticise, but to forget. 

Let us forget and go on ! 

Let us advance toward the sciences of life, the museum, 
the schools, the college of France. 

Let us advance toward the sciences of history and hu- 
manity, and toward the languages of the East. Let us 
consult the archaic genius in its harmony with so many 
recent travels. There we shall take the human sense. 

I entreat you, let us be men, and let us be exalted by 
the new and unprecedented grandeur of mankind. 

Thirty sciences, which had been belated, have just made 
their appearance, and with such a new vision, such a 
power of methods, that undoubtedly the number will be 
doubled to-morrow. 

Thirty centuries have been added to antiquity, and with 
them numberless monuments, languages, religions, and 
worlds, which reappear to judge this world of ours. 

An immense light, with crossed rays, terribly powerful 



Period of Universal Weakness. 331 

(even more than electric light), while crushing the past in 
all its scientific nonsense, has shown, instead, the victo- 
rious harmony of the two sisters, Science and Conscience. 
Every shadow has disappeared. Eternal Justice, identical 
in all epochs, and standing on its solid foundation of nature 
and hist.M-y, sheds its beams. 

This is the subject of this book. It is great and easy. 
The things for making it up had been so well prepared 
that the most unskilful hand has been sufficient to write it, 
but mankind is the real author. 

The vow which a great prophet used to make in the 
sixteenth century is an accomplished fact now. Here is 
the deep Faith. Who could shake it, and from what part 
could come the attack? Science and Conscience have 
embraced each other. 

Somebody is striving at something, or seems to be 
doing so. He gropes along in open day. He is a coun- 
terfeit blind man, who will have a stick when the road is 
even and very wonderfully illumined. 

Here is the whole mankind in perfect harmony. What 
do you wish more ? What interest have you in doubting? 
A torrent of light, the river of Right and Reason flows 
down from India to the year one thousand seven hundred 
and eighty-nine. The remotest antiquity is thyself. And 
thy race is the year one thousand seven hundred and 
eighty-nine. The Middle Ages are the stranger. 

Justice is not the foundling of yesterday, but the mis- 
tress and the heiress that wishes to return home — she is 
the true lady of the house. Who was before her? She 
can say : " I did spring up in the dawn at the glimmerings 
of the Vedas. In the morning of Persia I was the pure 
energy in the heroism of work. I was the Greek genius, 
and emancipation by the might of a word : ' Themis is 
Jove.' God is Justice itself. Hence Rome proceeds as 
well as the law which thou dost follow yet." 

"I should like . . . I perceive well that . . . ." But 
it is necessary to will completely. 



332 Bible of Humanity. 

To come to a close, I say only three words, but practi- 
cal ones, which ought to pass from father to son : Purifi- 
cation, Concentration, Greatness. 

Let us be honest and pure from mixture with the old. 
Let us not halt from one world to another. 

Let us beware in two senses — let us be strong against 
the chaos of the world, and of opinions — and let us be 
strong at home through the unity of the heart. 

The fireside is the stone which upholds the common- 
wealth. Without home everything perishes. To the vain 
systems which would break it down, the answer is a terri- 
ble one: " The child will not live." Men will be fewer, 
and the citizen an impossibility. 

People cry out: "Fraternity!" But they scarcely 
know what it is. It requires a security of morals as well 
as of character, and a pure austerity of which our century 
has little idea. 

If the fireside must be enlarged, it must be done first 
of all by making sit down at it the whole heroic humanity, 
the great church of Justice, which, among so many peo- 
ple and ages, has been perpetuated to this time. 

The fireside will then become again what it formerly 
waSj the altar. It is enlightened by a reflex of the uni- 
versal soul of the worlds, which is but Rectitude and 
Justice, impartial and unchangeable Love. 

It is the firm fireside that this book would make, or at 
least begin for you. It proposes to give you in the fire- 
side what it so often gave myself during this long work, 
which kept me up by day and awoke me by night — a 
great alleviation of suffering, a solemn and holy joy, the 
deep peace of light. 



NEW AND COMPLETE 

ALPHABETICAL INDEX 



COMPRISING ALL THE NAMES OF 



DEITIES, HEROES, PERSONS, REGIONS, CITIES, MOUNTAINS, 
RIVERS, ETC., MENTIONED IN THIS WORK. 



A. 
Aaron, 294. 
Abbas' monument, II. 
Abel, 241, 249. 
Abraham, 143 n., 144 n., 239 n., 250, 

260 n. 
Abram, 75. 

Acacia, 195, 196 n., 197 n. 
Achaeans, 116, 141. 
Acheia, 116. 
Achilles, 46, 70 n, no, 112, 121, 

123 n., 124, 139, 172, 230. 
Acropolis, 1 16, 154. 
Acts of the Apostles, 302. 
Aditi, 19 n. 

Admetus, 12S, 147, 14S. 
Adonai, 201, 203, 212, 2S8. 
Adonis, 129 n., 151, 163, 172, 175, 

177, 201, 203, 204, 205, 210, 212, 

218. 220, 223, 233, 261, 262, 268, 

273, 276, 2S4, 317. 
Adoration, 231. 
^Eolus, 102. 
yEgma, 90, no. 
^Egystus, 106. 
iEschylus, 85,99, 116, 124 n., 127,137 

n.,152, I53>i54, 155. 157, I59>* 6 °> 
161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 167, 168, 
169, 170, 171, 172, 300, 306. 

^Esculapius, 145. 

./Etna, 144. 

./Ethiopia, 69 n., 182. 

./Ethiopian, 166 n., 182 n. 

Affre, 304. 

Africa, 68, 69 n., 71, 142, 143, 179, 
180, 182, 184, 185, 198, 203, 276. 



Agamemnon, 106, 109, 161. 

Agapae, 312. 

Agathias, 202. 

Agathocles, 143 n., 283. 

Agesilaus, 227, 234. 

Aglaophanus, 98 n. 

Agni (the Fire) 15-24, 102. 

Agora, 109, 119. 

Agrippina, 274. 

Ahmes, 193 n. 

Ahnman, 59, 60, 63, 65, 70, 78, 209, 

247 m 
Ajax, 70, 73, 124, 164. 
Albania, 222, 223. 
Albijenses, 329. 
Albordj, 65. 
AlcDeus, 175. 
Alcides, 104. 
Alcinoiis, 108. 
Alcmena, 104, 140. 
Alexander the Great, 71, 124 n., 157, 

221, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229. 

230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 

238, 270, 276, 278, 279, 282, 283, 

288. 
Alexandria, 284, 302 n., 310 n. 
Algiers, 194. 
Alkestis, 106, 147, 175 • 
Alps (the), 144, 276. 
Altar (the), 332. 
Amazons, 129, 142, 143 n. 
Ameinias, 152, 163 n. 
Amenti, 194 n. 
America, 113, 278, 285. 
Amestris, 75, 202. 
Ammon, 202 n., 225, 233. 



334 



Index, 



Amorites, 23811. 

Amos, 135 n. 

Ampere, 194. 

Ampbictyons, 132, 133. 

Amshaspands, 57, 58, 59, 70, 246 n. 

Anahid, 247 n. 

Anai'tis, 83, 202, 210. 

Anaxagoras, 158, 164, 247 n. 

Anaxarchus, 227, 231. 

Andra, 55 n. 

Andromeda, 143 n. 

Anna, 75, 297. 298. 

Anna (the prophetess), 297. 

Anquetil Duperron, 5, 48 n., 56, 58, 

75- 
Antar, 140, 244. 
Anthesphoria, 95, 215. 
Anthesteria, 261 n. 
Antheus, 143 n. 
Anti- Christ, 317. 
Antigone, 106, 175. 
Antioch, 248. 
Antisthenes, 280. 
Antony, 275, 285. 
Antony (Saint), 320. 
Anubis, 188, 189, 192, 193, 275. 
Aphrodite, 104 n. 
Apis, 1S8. 
Apocalypse, 317 n. 
Apollo, 84, 85, 88 n., 103, 117, 119, 

121, 125, 126, 127, 128, I30, 131, 

133, 134, 135, i3 6 > 137, 138, 149, 
159, 162, 216, 233, 280, 284, 289. 

Apuleius. 211 n. 

Arabia, 69 n., 191, 200 n., 239^ 

Arabian woman, 75 n. 

Arabians, 72, 198 n., 241, 242 n., 245, 

253, 2 54, 3 2 2, 323- 
Arcadia, 85, 86, 141, 221. 
Arcadians, 116, 121. 
Ardvisura, 49. 
Areopagus, 164. 
Ares, 129. 
Arete, 108. 
Argolides, 116. 
Argos, 141. 
Aridaeus, 225. 
Aristarchus, 3. 
Aristides, 127, 154. 
Aristophanes, 118, 124 n., 152, 153, 

154, 165, 168, 174, 216 n., 218, 

219 n., 220 n. 
Aristotle, 112, 118, 121 n., 135 n., 136, 

159 n -> 173, 226, 227, 229, 232, 

269 n., 316. 
Armenia, 206, 213. 
Arrian, 232 n. 
Artaxerxes, 83. 



Aryans, 15, 16, 25, 26, 54, 166. 

Ascalon, 206, 239, 240. 

Ashera, 29S. 

Ashtaroth, 199, 200, 268. 

Asia, 71, 72, 82,83, 88 > 9 8 n -> 99? 
102, 109, 115, 117, 134, 143 n., 
144 n., 149, 153, 155, 158, 159, 
172, 174, 177, 183, 185, 198, 200, 
206, 207 n., 208, 209, 213, 217 n., 
229, 230, 232, 233, 246, 256, 270, 
276, 278, 286, 290. 

Asia Minor, 69 n., 149, 210, 226, 

305. 

Aspasia, 157, 158. 

Assyria, 68, 69, 70, 129 n. 

Assyrian Monuments, 16. 

Astarte, 143 n., 199, 200, 201, 203, 
204, 205, 246, 272, 298. 

Astruc, 246. 

Atargatis, 135 n. 

Ate\ 145. 

Aten, 243 n. 

Athaliah, 206. 

Athanasius, 312 n., 319. 

Atheneus, 113 n. 

Athens, 87, 96, 101, 109, 112, 116, 
117, 118, 119, 122, 123, 130, 133, 
134, 136, 141, 143 n., 152, 153, 
154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 160, 162, 
163, 164, 165, 166, 170, 171 n., 
212, 215, 219, 230, 278, 279, 280, 
321. 

Atlantis, 144. 

Attica, 87, 117, 134, 143 n. 

Atticus, 278. 

Attila, 320. 

Atton, 311 n. 

Atys, 95n.,i35n.,i5i, 163, 172,175, 
210, 218, 223, 233, 284, 288, 289, 
307, 317, 3i8. 

Atys-Sabazius, 21 1, 212, 223. 

Augeas, 138. 

Augustine (Saint), 257, 311, 325, 
326. 

Augustus, 235, 279, 288. 

Aurelian, 317. 

Aureng Zeb, 10. 

Aurora, m. 

Aurungabad, 10. 

Austen, 199 n. 

Avatar, 151, 288. 

Aventine hill, 277. 

Avesta, iv, v, 48 n., 55 n., 71, 75, 
107, 255 m, 320 n. 

Avesta Khordah, 66 n., 68. 

Axenus, 143 n. 

Aiyar, 77, 79, 80. 

Azor, 239. 



Index. 



335 



B. 



Baal, 143 n., 203, 214, 247, 254, 269. 

Baalpeor, 306, 212 n., 213, 214,268. 

Baaltis, 203, 204, 205. 

Babel, 206, 207, 208, 209, 242, 247 n. , 
266, 305, 317. 

Babylon, 45. 48 n.„ 55, 68, 70, 71, 83, 
109, 154. 19S, 199 n., 201, 204 n., 
206, 207, 208, 214. 21711., 229, 230, 
235. 236. 251, 272. 

Bacchantes, 136, 219, 220, 223, 224, 
231, 233. 

Bacchants, 223, 224. 

Bacchus, 91 n., 135. 136, 137, 14311., 
146, 151, 158, 159, [62, 163, 165, 
l68, 175. 212 n.. 213 n., 214, 215, 
2l6, 217, 2lS, 219, 220, 222, 223, 
224. 225. 226, 232, 233, 235, 236, 

247 n., 254, 317. 
Bacchus Dionysus, 15S. 
Bacchus Sabazius, 212, 213, 225, 233, 

275, 2S4, 285, 288. 
Bactriana, 16, 24, 43, 317. 
Bagdad; 77. 
i . 230. iy. 

Bajazet, 206 n. 
Balaam, 206. 214. 
Barnabas, 304. 
Baruch, 20011. 
Bassora, 9. 
Bathyllus, 122. 
Baudry, njn. , 125. 
Beasts (the City of), 320 n. 
Bedouin, 19S n. 
Belial, 268. 
Bellerophon, 145. 
Beluchistan, 69 n. 
Benares, 35. 
Bengal, 35. 
Boetia, 125, 141. 
Bernard (Saint), 257. 
Berthelot, 20 n. 
Bertillon, 255 n. 
Bethany, 301 n. 
Beys, 190. 
Bible (Jewish), vi, 237, 241, 246, 247, 

253, 254, 255, 259, 270, 296, 304 n. 
Bible (the Greek), 171. 
Bible of goodness (the), 2. 
Bibles of light (the), v. 
Bilhah, 75. 
Black Sea, 143. 
Bobak, 55 n. 
Bochart, 238. 
Bonaparte, 227, 229. 
Book of the dead (the), 189. 
Book (the three peoples of the), 321 n. 



Bossuet, 313 n. 

Boita, 199 11. 

Bouvier, 313 n. 

Brahma, 1. 

Brahman, 1, 27, 28, 29, 31, 35, 39, 41, 

42. 
Brahminical, 88. 
Buddha, 184. 
Buddhism, 46* n. 
Burkhardt, 75 n. 
Burnuuf, E., 7, 13, 18, 52, 56, 57, 

70 11. 
Busiris, 142, 143 n. 
Bryant, Jacob, 143 n., 166 n., 200 n. 
Byblos, iS6, 196, 202, 203, 210, 212, 
" n., 261, 268. 



— j . , , 

Byzantium, 105, 184, 



Cabiri, ioi. 

Caboul, 24. 

Cadmilus, 135. 

Cadmus, 129 n. 

Caesar, 274, 275, 276, 279, 284, 285, 

306, 307, 308, 309, 315, 317. 
Caesars (the), 233, 235, 236. 
Cahen, 260 n., 296 n. 
Caillaud, 182 n., 194 n., 281. 
Cain, 241, 249. 
Callimachus, I29n. 
Callipyges, 218. 
Callisthenes, 227, 232. 
Callydicians, 312 n. 
Calypso, 107. 

Campana (the collection), 90 n, 
Canaan, 246, 254. 
Canaanitcs, 238 n. 
Cappadocia, 200 n. 
Caracalla, 231. 
Caramania, 69 n. 
Carlovingian friars, 320. 
Carmel, 264 n. 
Carthage, v, vi, 159, 198, 199, 212, 

222, 238, 275, 276, 277, 283, 311 n. 
Cashmere, 12, 34, 139 n. 
Cassandra, 171. 
Cassianus, 299. 
Castalia, 126. 
Castile, 321 n. 
Castor, 122. 
Casuists, 324, 
Cato, 282. 

Catullus, 202 n., 273, 289^ 
Caucasus, 115, 143, 154, 165, 167, 

169. 
Cayapa, 139 n. 



336 



Index. 



Celtica, 316. 

Celtic forest, 144. 

Centaurs, 134, 139, 146, 147, 150, 

222, 230. 
Central Asia, 239 n. 
Cephissus, 136. 
Ceraunii mountains, 223. 
Cerberus, 148. 
Ceres, 84, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92, 

93> 94, 95> 9 6 ' 97, 98, 99, 101, "7, 

132, 135, 145, 147, 162, 163, 215, 

217, 222, 312. 
Ceylon, 35, 42. 
Chalcedonia, 311 n. 
Chaldea, 53, 71, 242, 245, 252, 274. 
Chaldeans, 82. 
Champollion, 7, 182, 190, 193 n., 

194 n. 
Charity, 296. 
Charlemagne, 103, 235. 
Charles the Bald, 254. 
Charon, 139 n., 148. 
Chatrya, 32, 35. 
Cheiron, 107, 121, 139 n., 146. 
Cherbuliez, 123 n. 
Cheronea, 155, 221, 226. 
Cherubim, 294. 
Chians, 113 n. 
China, 26. 
Chloe, 303. 
Choephores, 161. 
Chrishna, 121. 
Christ, 303 n., 304. 
Christendom, 174. 
Christian carols, 323, 324. 
Christian centuries, 193. 
Christianity, 169 n., 291, 313 n. 
Christian legends, 320. 
Christian monuments, 319. 
Christian myths, 189. 
Christians, 97, 105, 255 n„ 257, 278, 

29h 3I5> 317, 321 n. 
Christmas songs, 299. 
Chrysippus, 281. 
Church (Eastern), 291. 
Church (the fathers of the), 283, 284. 
Church of Justice, 332. 
Church (Latin), 294. 
Church (Reformed), 304 n. 
Church (Western), 293. 
Cicero, 278, 282, 285. 
Cidarim, 236. 
Cilicia, 305. 
Cimon, 154, 161. 
Circassia, 278 n. 
Circes, 19, 107. 
Claudius, 300, 306, 307. 
Cleitus, 231. 



Clement of Alexandria, 129 n., 163 n., 

31011., 319. 
Cleoles, 287. 
Cleon, 168. 
Cleonthes, 282. 
Cleopatra, 275, 285. 
Cleophas, 301. 
Clerotes, 112. 
Cloud (the), mother of the Centaurs, 

146. 
Clitarchus, 229. 
Cluny Museum, 156 n. 
Clymeue, 167. 
Clytemnestra, 106, 161. 
Cocks, C, 328 n. 
Cobi (desert of), 58. 
Colchis, 166. 

Colonus, 157, 165, 166, 167. 
Conception (Immaculate), 291. 
Conde, 229. 
Confucius, 295. 
Conon, 202 n. 
Conscience, 331. 
Consentes (gods), 277. 
Constant, Benj., 99 n., 108 n., 300 n. 
Constantine, 318. 
Corinth, 173, 304, 305. 
Corinthians (Epistle to the), 97 n., 

30211., 303, 304 n., 306 n. 
Cornelia, 274. 
Cow-mother, 184. 
Cramer, 121 n. 
Crete, 112, 117, 143 n., 214. 
Croesus, 155, 162. 
Ctesias, 207 n. 
Cybele, 135, 143, 172, 210, 224, 284, 

307. 
Cyclades, 272, 273. 
Cyclops, 101. 
Cycnus, 143 n. 
Cynaegirus, 152. 
Cynosarges, 280. 
Cyprian (Saint), 314. 
Cyprus, 113, 200, 272. 
Cyrus, n 8. 
Cythera, 173, 200. 



D. 



Daqaratha, 33. 
Daedalus, 145. 
Daevas, 55 n. , 58. 
Dagon, 246 n. 
Dagobert, 320. 
Dakiki, 79. 
Dakoka, 55 n., 68 n. 
Dalmatia, 316. 



Index, 



337 



Damascus, 12, 264. 

Daniel, 55, 68, 20S n., 209 n., 242, 

271, 289 n., 300. 
Dante, 325, 329. 
Daphne, 1 

Daphnis, 285 n. 
Danube, 315. 
Dargaud, 266 n. 
Darwands, 5S, 61. 

, 36. 
Daumer, 214 n. 

David, 302, 241 n., 246, 249, 253. 

Dead Sea, 144 11. ,179, 201, 245,24611., 

273- 
Deliorah, 206. 
Dejanira, 149, 150. 

Delia, 273, 274. 
Delilah, 267. 

Delos, 117, 12S, 130. 

Delphi, 120, 125, 126, 127, 130, 13*1, 

133, 134, 136, 137, 159, 162,224, 

227. 
Delphos, 96, ^20. 
De-Meter, 84, 85, 125, 129 a, 135, 

143 n., 15.,, 215, 222. 
Demetrius, 195, 222. 
Demodoctts, 100. 
Denis, 222, 2^0, 2S2. 
Denis, the little, 311 n. 
Denmark, 27S n. 

Derceto, 199, 206. 

De Rouge', 193 n., 194 n., 197 n. 

Dervish, 80. 

Desire the god), 206, 216, 268. 

ina, 86. 
De^pois, 313. 
Destiny, 169. 

Deuteronomy, 240, 241 n. 
Diana, 10S, 129 n. 
Diana of Birmo, 143. 
Didot, 304 n. 
Diodorus, 137 n., 145 n., 183, 190, 

191, 206, 207 n., 215 n., 236 n. 
Diogenes, 173, 2S0, 281. 
Diomedes, 143 n. 
Dionysus, 136 n., 159, 213, 222. 
Docetae, 292. 
Dodona, 87, 223. 
Dodwell, 315 n. 
Dominic (Saint), 291. 
Dorian invasions, 103, 107, 1 12. 
Dorians, 84, 85, 116, 117, 128, 131, 

141. 
Doryxenes, in. 
Dove (incarnation of the), 290. 
Druses, 269. 
Drusilla, 273 n. 
Dryden, 276 n., 285 n. 
22 



Dumesnil, 67 n. 
Duns Scot, 300 n. 



E. 



ECCLESIASTES, 267, 268, 270, 298. 

Ecclesiasticus, 324 n. 

Echetus, 143 n. 

Eckstein, 300 n. 

Education, 120. 

Egypt, 4, 8, 29, 50, 71, 100, 123 n., 
129 m, 144 n., 151, 153, 155,175, 
179, 1 80, 182, 183, 184, 185, 187, 

159, 190, 191, 192, 194, 195, 196, 
19S, 200 n.,205, 2I 4> 2I 6 n -,2i7 n., 
227, 232, 238, 239 n., 242, 243, 252, 
274, 275, 284, 287, 294, 295, 300, 

317. 
Egyptians, 135, 193. 
Elagabalus, 317. 
Elea, 157. 
Eleans, 133. 
Eleusis, 87, 91 n., 96, 98, 1 17, 159, 

160, 163 n., 165, 215, 220. 
Eleuthereus, 219. 

Elis, 141. 

Elijah, 290. 

Elizabeth, 297, 298, 299. 

Elkanah, 75 n. 

Elohe, 247. 

Elohim, 247. 

Elysian Fields, no. 

Emilius Paulus, 283. 

Emilius (Rousseau's), 330. 

Emir, 244 n. 

English (the), 321 n. 

Enna, 98. 

Epaminondas, 127, 14 1, 215 n., 226. 

Ephesus, 129 n. 

Epiphane, 294. 

Epiphanius, 293. 

Epirus, 221, 222, 223, 224, 227, 232, 

233, 235, 236. 
Epistle to the Romans, 305, 306 n., 

307 m, 309 m 
Epopt, 303 n. 
Equity, 329. 
Erastus, 305, 306. 
Erectheus, 143 n. 
Eros, 217, 218. 
Erymanthus, 140. 
Eryx, 143 n. 
Esau, 241, 242, 249. 
Esculapius, 233. 
Esdras, 253, 272 n. 
Esquimaus, 320. 



33% 



Index. 



Esther, 206, 236 n., 265, 270, 272, 

273, 294. 
Estia, 87, 101. 
Eternal Justice, 311, 322. 
Etruria, 287. 
Eumenides, 130, 157, 161, 162, 164, 

165, 167, 168, 170, 171. 
Eumeus, 107, ill. 
Eumolpus, 129 n. 
Euphrates, 55, 58, 199, 206, 208, 

2I3,3I5- 
Euridice, 106. 
Euripides, 153, 157, 20211. 
Europa, 89. 
Europe, 83, 100, 143 n., 180, 183, 

234, 235, 255 n -, 283. 
Euryclee, 108. 
Eurystheus, 121, 140, 147, 148, 149, 

280, 281. 
Eusebius, 319. 
Eutiphron, 217 n., 252, 281. 
Euxine, 143. 
Eve, 119 n., 177, 320. 
Eve (Hindoo), 39. 
Evhemerus, 104, 234. 
Ever, 328. 
Evian hymn, 136 n. 
Ezekiel, 214, 240 n., 251, 255, 273, 

277, 300 n. 



Faith (deep), 331. 

Fallah, 194. 

Fatalism, 169 n. 

Father (God the), 321. 

Fathers of the Church, 293. 

Fathers of the Greek Church, 325. 

Fauche, 30 n. 

Feast of a thousand years, 323. 

Ferouer, 58, 62, 70. 

Firdusi, 72, 73, 74, 77, 78, 79, 80. 

Flagellants, 211. 

Flandres, 299. 

Fouche d'Obsonville, 14 n. 

Fortunatus, 314 n. 

France, 229. 

France (College of), 7, 330. 

France of the Revolution (the), 286. 

Franck, 257 n. 

Fraternity, 332. 

Fravashi, 62, 75. 

Fredegaire, 320. 

Frederick, 229. 

French Revolution (History of the), 

328. 
Friesland, 285. 
Furies, 165. 



Gabriel, 67. 
Gades, 143. 
Gaia, 86. 

Gaius, 316. 

Galatians, 313 n. 

Galienus, 215 n. 

Galilea, vii. 

Galilee, 240, 296 n., 301 n. 

Galileo, 173. 

Galli, 298 n., 307. 

Gallus, 274. 

Ganges, 2, 3, 24, 25, 68. 

Gaza, 230, 239. 

Gazelle, 3, 34, 40, 267. 

Gelon, 159, 222. 

Genesis (book of), 206, 314, 24911., 
254, 260 n. 

Genghis, 184. 

Genius of sleep, 218. 

Genoa, 321 n. 

Gerhard, Ed., 213 n. 

Germania (Tacitus), 315. 

Germany, 99 n., 117. 

Geryon, 142, 143 n. 

Gheber, 60, 72, 73, 78, 79. 

Ghillany, 214 n. 

Ghilo, 86 n. 

Gingras, 202, 203. 

Gnosticism, 294. 

God tempts man, 325 n. 

Golconda, 9. 

Goliath, 249. 

Good Luck, 230. 

Gorgias, 163. 

Gorresio, 30 n. 

Gospel, 325, 329. 

Gospel of the Carpenter, 322. 

Gospel of Mary, 293, 299. 

Gospels (official), 300, 301. 

Goths, 320. 

Goujon, 156. 

Grace, 168, 170, 248, 255, 271, 276, 
294, 301, 302, 305, 306, 310, 326, 
327, 329- 

Graces, 129 n. 

Great Synagogue, 253. 

Greece, v, 2, 24, 69, 82, 83, 85, 2>6, 
87, 9°, 9i> 9 2 , 97» 98 n., 99, 100, 
101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 109, 
no, in, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 
117, 119, 120,121, 123 n., 125, 
126, 127, 128, 129 n., 130, 131, 

132, 133, 134, 138, 141, 142, 143 n -» 
144, 150, 151, 155, 156, 158, 159, 
163, 169 n., 170, 172, 173, 174, 
175, 176, 198, 208, 210, 212, 213, 



Index. 



339 



217, 221, 222, 224, 225, 226, 228, 
229, 230, 231, 232, 233. 251, 261, 
270. 277. 27S, 279, 2S0, 2S4, 2S6, 

300 n.. 302 a., 305, 311 n. 
ation in), 120. 
mtine, 321 n. 
Gregory of Nyssa, 293. 
Guignaut, 9Sn., 210 n. 
Guinea, 

Gnstasp. 70 n., 74, 75, 78, 13S. 
Gymnaaum, 122, 124, 125. 



II. 



. 141. 

- 75- 
H.un, 266 n. 
Hannibal, 276. 
Efannman, 45, 46, 140. 
Hadma, 256. 
Harems of the East, 186. 
Eiarmodius, 155. 
I [armonia, 129 n. 
Eiarpocrates, 205, 275. 

Ila- 

1 1. net, 296 n. 

II eh-, 129 n., 151. 

Hebrew records, 144 n. 

Hector, 124. 

Hedjaz, 244. 

Heifer (worship of the), 246, 247. 

Ilekate, 92. 

Hela,' 1 14. 

Helen, S9. 124 n. 

Heliogabolus, 233. 

Hellenic gods, 2S0. 

Hellenic religion, 112. 

Hellenization of the East, 226. 

Hell, 147, 148, 149. 

Helos, 133. 

Helotes, 113, 

Hengstenberg, 243 n. 

Hephsstion, 233. 

Hephaistos, 166. 

Heraclides, 117. 

Herakles, 144 n. 

Hercules, 44, 82, 84, 93, 101, 103, 
117, 119, 121, 127, 133, 134, 137, 
138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 
145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 
155, 157, 158, 170, 177, 218, 223, 
280, 281, 282. 

Hercules (Porch of), 281, 285. 

Here, 102. 

Heri-culyus, 13911. 

Herman, 121 n. 

Hermaphrodite, 203. 



Hermas, 319. 

Hermes, 117, 119, 121, 122, 124, 

125. 127, 129 m, 135 n. 
Herodias, 267. 
Herodotus, 57, 152, 154, 162, 163, 

183 n., 200 n., 206, 207 n., 214 n., 

300 n. 
Hesiod, 103 n., 115, 141, 167, 278. 
Hesione, 89. 
Hezekiah, 293 n. 
Hierapolis, 200 n. 
Hieronimus, 239 n. 
Hik-sos, 129 n., 238 n., 239 n., 242, 

243- 
Hilaire (Saint), 214 n. 
Hilarius, 314. 
Hillel, 295, 296. 
Himalaya, 25, 35. 
Hindoos, 2, 12, 44, 54, 55, 56, 68, 

87, 88, 120. 
Hindostan, 25, 42, 43. 
Hippa, 86 n., 143 n. 
Hippocrates, 173, 200 n., 316. 
Hippolytus, 136. 
Hislop, 143 n. 
Hittites, 238 n,, 243 n. 
Hivites, 238 n. 
Hoa, 246 n. 
Holophernes, 272. 
Holy Alliance, 255 n. 
Holy of Holies, 298. 
Holy Ghost, 290, 31 1 n, 313 n. 
Horaa, 52, 53, 70. 
Homer, 84, 85, 89, 91 n., 97, 108, 

112, 119, 124 n., 127, 128 n., 144, 

145, 148, 152, 171, 176, 218, 230, 

279, 300 n, 
Horace, 279, 282, 286. 
Horus, 129 n., 184, 275. 
Hubioula, 9. 
Humboldt, 139 n. 
Hyde, 236 n. 



Iacchus, 135, 162, 215. 

Iao, 245, 246 n,, 247 n. 

Iberia, 142. 

Icarus, 145. 

Ida, 103. 

Idumea, 244. 

Idumeans, 294. 

Tgnatius (Saint), 314, 32611. 

Ikswaha, 339 n. 

Iliad, 2, 85, 87, 103 n,, no, US, no. 

123, 124, 139. 
Ilissus, 136 n. 
Ilium, 230. 



34° 



Index. 



India, i, 4, 5, 6, 8, 13, 26, 27, 28, 
29, 38, 39» 43» 5 2 > 53> 62, 69, 78, 
82, 85, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 
151, 159, 184, 189, 213, 218, 226, 
232, 235, 314, 320, 321 n., 331. 

Indian art, 8, 89. 

Indra, 19 n., 24 n., 53, 55, 102, 103. 

Indus, 2, 35. 

Inman, 238. 

Inquisition, 326 n. 

Io, 89, 169. 

Iole, 149. 

Ionia, 84, 87, 97, 1 55-, 157, 158, 162, 
166, 200. 

Ionian, 129 n. 

Ionic, 131. 

Iphigenia, 120, 311. 

Iran, 55, 56, 58, 71, 317. 

Ireland, 89. 

Ireneus, 319. 

Iris, 94, 143 n. 

Isaac, 239 n. 

Isaiah, 153, 171, 242, 248, 250, 295. 

Isfendiar, 75. 

Ishmael, 249. 

Isis, 90, 135 n., 182, 183, 185, 186, 
187, 188, 192, 195, 196, 205, 275, 
284. 

Isis-Athor, 184. 

Isis-Osiris, 184. 

Islamism, 313 n. 

Isodetes, 219. 

Israel, 208, 238 n., 240, 241. 

Italian genius, 277. 

Italians, 316. 

Italy, 87, 200 n., 210, 221, 229, 276, 
279, 283, 284, 288. 

Ithaca, 107. 



J. 



Jacob, 75 n., 241, 242, 243, 248, 

249, 250, 253, 267. 
Jagemat, 314. 
Jahel, 206. 
James, 293, 298. 
James the Just, 295 n. 
Jebusites, 238 n. 
Jehoshaphat, 240. 
Jehovah, 239 n., 243 n., 244, 245, 

246, 247, 252, 256. 
Jemshid, 75. 
Jephtha, 143 n. 

Jeremiah, 135 n., 241, 251, 255. 
Jericho, 268, 272 n. 
Jerome (Saint), 202 n., 260 n., 272 n., 

3I9- 



Jerusalem, vii, 1, 240, 251, 294, 295. 

Jesus, 193, 284, 286, 289, 292, 293, 
294, 295, 296, 300, 301, 302, 307, 
310 n., 311, 312 n., 319, 323. 

Jesus son of Sirach, 300 n. 

Jewish high priest, 236 n. 

Jewish monuments, 319. 

Jewish novels, 294. 

Jewish patriarchs, 239 n. 

Jewish women, 272. 

Jews, 193, 198, 202 n., 208, 237, 238, 
239 n., 240, 241, 242, 245, 246, 
249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 
255 n., 256, 257, 259, 260, 270, 
274, 287, 294, 295, 296, 300 n., 
306, 307, 320, 324. 

Jezebel, 206, 267. 

Job, 244, 245, 296 n. 

John (Saint), 294, 301, 325 n. 

John the Baptist, 295, 297. 

Jordan, 246 n. , 239, 240. 

Joseph, 190, 242, 248, 249, 253, 270, 
293, 298, 299, 323. 

Joshua, 238, 254. 

Jove, 331. 

Jowett, 304 n. 

Juda, 298. 

Judah, 200 n., 208, 239 n., 240, 248, 
249. 

Judaism, no. 

Judea, 2, 68, 69, 174, 237, 238, 239, 
240, 242, 245, 246, 247, 264, 293, 
296 n., 299, 302 n., 321 n. 

Judges (book of), 239 n., 248, 254. 

Judgment, 327, 328. 

Judith, 206, 272. 

Julian law, 310. 

Julien (Stanislas), 26 n. 

Julius Caesar, 285 n. 

Julius II., 153. 

Juno, 102, 103, 117, 137 n., 169. 

Jupiter, 86, 92, 101, 102, 103., 104, 
109, 112, 115, 121, 123 n., 125, 
126 n., 127, 140, 141, 142, 146. 
147, 148, 154, 158, 162, 165, 166, 
167, 168, 169, 170, 217, 231, 281, 
284. 

Jupiter-Bacchus, 167. 

Jurist, 306, 308, 309, 310, 317. 

Juvenal, 279 n., 316. 



K. 



Kadesha. 249 n. 
Kadeshim, 298 n. 
Kadeshuth, 29S n. 
Kane, 320. 



Index. 



341 



Ketn, 246 n. 

Kiqga (book of), 240 n., 241, 254. 

J n. 
Koran, 313 n. 

<»5 n. 
KraMiiski, 242 n. 

Kreuzer, 98 n., 210 n., 214 n., 216 n. 
Kuhn (Ad.), 19 n. 



L. 



. 31 1 n. 
Lai icon, 2S3 306. 
Lacedaemonians, 113. 

I 'iiia, I 13. 

Lactantius, 315 n. 

Laertes, 107, 108, in. 

gones, 143 n. 
Laferricrc, 2S3 a, 
Laksmana, 33. 
Lamartine, 272 n. 
Lamia, 200 n. 
Langlois, 17, 19 n. 
Lanka, 45, 46. 
Laodicea, 31 1 n. 
Larroqne (P.), 297. 
Latona, 101, 12S, 129 n. 
Law, 306, 308, 309, 315, 326, 331. 
Law (Mosaic), 296, 302. 
Layanl, 199 n., 212 n. 
Leah. 267. 
Lebanon, 260 n., 264. 

-34- 
Lefevre, 260 n. 
Leonidas, 226. 
Lepsius, 190, 194 n. 
Lerna (Hydra of), 150. 
Lesbia, 273. 
I . 174. i75- 

Lesley, 239 n. , 243 n. 
Leto, 129 n. 
Letronne, 191 n. 
Leucadia, 175 n, 
Levi, 249. 
Leviathan, 244. 

Leviticus, 143 n., 240 n., 260 n., 295. 
Libya, 179, 191, 198, 285. 
Likaon, 87, no, 143 n. 
Lima, 262. 
Linus, 121. 

Lobeek, 98 n., 213 n. , 215 n., 22411. 
Locrians, in. 
Logos, 289, 296 n. , 302 n. 
Loiseleur, 27 n. 
Lolo (the songs of), 299. 
Lot, 201, 202, 253, 266, 274 n. 
Louis (Saint), 32 n., 271 n. 



Louis XIV., 235, 271 n. 

Louvre, 189, 218 n. 

Love 324, 325, 326, 332. 

Love "cadet brother of), 214. 

Love (Plato's mediator), 216. 

Loxias, 162. 

Luaios, 136. 

Lucan, 283 n. 

Lucian, 129 n. 

Lucretius, 278. 

Luke « Saint;, 297 n., 301 n., 325 n. 

Luynes, 90 n. 

Lyeos, 219. 

Lycoris, 274, 285. 

Lycurgus, 113. 

Lydia, 149, 162, 202, 210, 303. 

Lyguria, 316. 

Lysios, 219. 

Lysippus, 225. 

Lysistratus, 220 n. 



M. 



NfACARIUS, 320. 

Macchabees, 294, 302. 

Macchiavellianism (Spartan), 114. 

Macedonia, 155, 221, 222, 303. 

Macedonians, 228. 

Ma3cenas, 288. 

Magdalene, 263, 267, 301, 312. 

Magi (Chaldean), 206, 207 n., 208. 

Magianism, 48. 

Magians, 207, 209, 212, 231, 235, 

236, 266, 2S7. 
Mahabarata, 4, 7, 13, 28. 
Maha Lakshmi, 85 n. 
Mahmoud (the Gaznevide), 77, 78, 79, 

80. 
Malagamba (Miss), 272 n. 
Manasseh, 298 n. 
Mandakini, 33. 
Mansi, 311 n. 
Manu, 27, 28, 29, 295. 
Marathon, 82, 122, 127, 141, 151, 

152, I55> I S 6 , J58, 161, 164. 
Marculf, 286 n. 

Marcus- Aurelius, 177, 282, 316. 
Mardocheus, 242. 
Marius. 143 n., 283, 315. 
Mark (Saint), 294, 325 n. 
Marozia, 275. 

Mars, 116, 129 n., 143, 203, 287. 
Mars (hill), 163 n. 
Marsyas, 216. 
Martha, 301 n., 302. 
Martial, 273 n. 
Mary of Magdala, 287, 301, 303. 



342 



Index. 



Mary (the Virgin), 291, 292, 293, 294, 

298, 299, 312 n. 
Mary (wife of Cleophas), 301, 302. 
Matthew (Saint), 307 n., 315 n., 325. 
Maury (Alfred), 98 n., 99 n., 134 n. 
Mayence, 311 n. 
Medea, 19, 213, 223, 316. 
Medes, 71. 
Median wars, 136. 
Mediterranean, 144, 317, 321 n. 
Meister, 283 n. 
Melkarth, 144 n. 
Menard (Louis), 104 n., 112 n., 169 

n., 300 n. 
Mendicants (order of), 325 n. 
Menelaus, 124 n. 
Menes, 144 n. 
Menippes, 281. 
Mercury, 94, 170. 
Merlin, 241. 
Mesopotamia, 239 n. 
Messana, 133. 
Messena, 114. 
Messiah, 308. 
Messiah (Polish), 297. 
Messiah (Russian), 297. 
Messiahnism, 288, 289. 
Messiahs, 299. 
Messianic epidemic, 228. 
Messianic foolishness, 234. 
Metella, 286. 
Michael Angelo, 153. 
Mickiewicg, 242 n. 
Middle Ages, 146, 193, 207 n., 213, 

215, 269 n., 275, 299, 308, 313, 

321, 322, 323, 325 n., 327, 329, 

33°, 33 1- 
Midianites, 246. 
Miletus, 157, 162, 219 n. 
Miltiades, 127, 161. 
Mimallone, 220. 
Mimosa, 195, 196 n. 
Minerva, 101, 115, 121, 130, 141, 

148, 154, 155, 164, 284. 
Minotaur, 89, 117, 157, 214. 
Mithraic ceremonies, 307 n., 317. 
Mithraic doctrines, 302 n. 
Mithraism, 318. 
Mithras, 216, 236, 284, 286, 308, 

317, 3i8. 
Mithras- Venus, 212 n. 
Mithridates, 317. 
Mitra, 23. 
Moab, 202 n. 
Mohammed, 73, 77. 
Mohammedan, 321 n. 
Moira, 114, 145 n. 
Molh, 74. 



Molinos, 304. 

Moloch, 83, 200, 203, 205, 212, 221, 

247, 248, 276. 
Mongols, 55. 
Monimus, 281. 
Montesquieu, 56, 232. 
Mordocai, 272. 
Morocco, 321 n. 
Mosaic Law, 306. 
Moses, 238 n., 245, 250, 256, 271, 

300. 
Mother Earth, 321 n. 
Movers, 204 n., 212 n., 2i4n., 224 n., 

238, 245. 
Midler (Max), 22 n., 31 n., 102. 
Miiller (Ottfried), 165 n. 
Munk, 239 n. , 300. 
Munter, 238. 
Muses, 128. 
Mussulmans, 72, 73, 74, 79, 80, 81, 

169 n. 
Mylitta, 200 n., 209, 210, 212 n., 

217 n., 236, 247 n. 
Myrrh, 274 n. 
Myrrha, 201, 202, 266. 



N. 

Nabi, 208. 

Nabis, 317. 

Nabuchodonosor, 208, 209. 

Naplous, 240. 

Narcissus, 306, 307. 

Nausicaa, 108, 160. 

Nautch-girls, 307. 

Nazarene, 290. 

Nearchus, 227. 

Negroes, 198 n. 

Nehemiah, 294. 

Nemesis, 115, 145, 154, 155. 

Nephthys, 189 n. 

Neptune, 109, 115, 117, 123, 145, 

160. 
Nero, 218, 306, 307, 308, 309, 317. 
Nessus, 150. 
Nestor, 107. 
Never, 328. 
Newfoundland, 320. 
Newton, 173. 
Nialsaga, 107. 

Nicolas (Michel), 48, 300 n. 
Niebelungen, 140, 241. 
Nile, 50, 68, 179, 180, 182, 183, 1S6, 

187, 197 n., 198. 
Nimrod, 144 n. 
Nineveh, 70, 109, 201, 206. 
Ninus, 206. 



Index. 



343 



Nitocris, 209. 

Noah, 266. 

Noel (Eugenius), 320 n. 

Nova, 95 n. 

Novel (apparition of the) 270. 

Nyktelian rites, 129 n. 

Nyssa, 293. 



O. 



Oasis, 1S0. 

Octavius, 279. 

Odyssey, 100, 108, in, 115, 124, 139. 

(Edipus, 107, 153, 157, 165, 167. 

02ta, 137, 151. 

Oiorpata, 143 n. 

Old Testament, 325. 

Olympia, 96, 127, 133, 134, 141, 142. 

Olympian, 156, 163 n., 174. 

Olympian, 224, 225, 226, 227. 

Olympus, 97, 100, 102, 103 n., 109, 

123 n., 144, 148, 149, 150, 151, 

158, 162. 
Omphale (the queen), 149. 
One Day, 328. 
Oresteia, 153, 161. 
Orestes, 129, 161, 162, 164, 165. 
Origen, 202 n. , 293. 
Ormuzd, 57, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 66, 

70, 75, 209, 247 n., 256. 
Orpheus, 106, 137, 163, 216, 289. 
Ortloff, 2S3. 
Osiris, 90, 135, 151, 163 n., 184, 185, 

1S6, 1S7, 18S, 190, 196, 205, 235, 

275. 
Ostrogoths, 319. 
Ouranos, 86. 
Ovid, 105. 



P. 



Pacific (islands of the), 143 n. 
Palestine, 135 n., 238 n., 239 n., 243, 

246 n. , 247 n. , 300. 
Palm-tree, 194. 
Pallakies, 307. 
Pallas, 85, 116, 127, 135, 158, 166, 

177, 312. 
Pallas-Athene, 103, 106, 109. 
Pan, 134. 

Panatheiuea, 123, 134. 
Pandora, 120. 
Pannychis, 129 n. 
Pantheon, 284, 311. 
Paphos, 129 n. 
Papinianus, 316. 
Paradise (the river of), 2. 



Parcse, 115, 169, 255 n. 

Paria, i. 

Parian marble, 85. 

Paris, 124 n. 

Parnassus, 125, 126, 220. 

Parsees, 6, 60, 72, 74, 79. 

Parthenogenesis, 201. 

Parthia, 317. 

Parthians, 232. 

Parysatis, 75, 202 n. 

Passover, 259. 

Pathemata, 214. 

Patroclus, no, 124. 

Paul (Saint), 97, 287, 296, 300, 302, 

304, 305, 306, 307, 3", 313 n -> 

325- 
Paula, 286, 287. 

Pausanias, 86, 126 n., 159, 221 n. 
Pehlvi (book), 79. 
Peisistratidae, 124 n., 155, 169. 
Pelasgi, 85, 87, 129 n., 166. 
Pelasgians, 141. 
Peleiades, 129 n. 
Peloponnesus, 114, 133, 272. 
Penelope, 107, 108 n. 
Penestes, 112. 
Peninnah, 75 n. 
Pericles, 154, 157, 158, 159, 164, 168, 

171. 
Perizzites, 238 n. 
Persephone, 86. 
Persepolis, 71, 229. 
Persia, 29, 48, 50, 52, 53, 56, 57, 61, 

62, 63, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 

73, 74, 75, 77, 7§, 80, 82, 133, 139, 

151, 172, 195, 209, 212, 217 n., 

238, 239 n., 247 n., 256, 320, 

321 n., 331. 
Persians, 138, 162, 222, 229, 230, 

231, 234. 
Peter (Saint), 307. 
Peyrat, 297 n. 

Pharaohs, 183, 190, 197 n., 259. 
Pharisees, 255, 295, 302. 
Pheidias, 86, 90 n., 154, 155, 156, 

158, 172, 174. 
Phemius, 100. 
Pherecydes, 216 n. 
Phigalea, 86 n. 
Philip, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 

228. 
Philistines, 239, 246. 
Philo, 202 n., 289, 293, 300. 
Philoctetes, 157. 
Phocis, 134. 
Phocians, ill. 
Phcebe, 287, 304, 305, 306, 307, 309, 

310, 311. 



344 



Index, 



Phoebus, ioi, 117, 126, 128, 129 n., 

162. 
Phoenicia, 88, 98 n., 129 n., 135, 173, 

186, 199, 212 n., 216 n., 238, 245. 
Phoenicians, 99, 239, 242 n., 252. 
Phoenix, 121. 
Pholus, 146. 
Photius, 202 n. 
Phra, 317. 
Phrygia, 131, 134, 151, 172, 196 n., 

206, 2IO, 212, 220, 221, 223, 234, 
284, 317. 

Phrygian orgies, 223. 

Phyrrus, 283. 

Pindar, 127, 130, 141, 160. 

Pisistratus, 159. 

Pithom, 243 n. 

Platea, 83, 127, 151, 159. 

Plato, 66 n., 118, 121 n., 125, 129 n., 

172, 173, 175, 192 n., 211 n., 216, 

217 n., 300 n. 
Plutarch, 105, 116, 189 n., 195 n., 

229 n. , 232, 236 n., 279 n. 
Pluto, 91, 92, 94, 99, 109, 122, 147, 

148, 216, 220, 275. 
Poland, 278 n. 
Polias (Minerva), 154. 
Polonius, 329. 
Polyaen, 223 n. 
Polycrates, 155. 
Polykleitus, 168, 217. 
Polyphemus, 143 n. 
Pompey, 305, 317. 
Pontus, 302 n. 
Pontus Euxinus, 317. 
Poseidon, 86 n. 
Postel, 294. 
Praetor, 283, 303, 306. 
Predestination, 325. 
Preller, 317. 
Priapus, 213, 214. 
Priapic orgies, 288. 
Primitive Gospel, 322. 
Procla, 273 n. 
Procurators, 303, 306. 
Prometheus, 82, 98, 101, 103 n., 109, 

115, 152, 153, 154, 165, 166, 167, 

168, 169, 170, 171, 177, 281, 300. 
Propertius, 273, 274 n. 
Proserpina, 86, 87, 89, 90, 94, 95, 99, 

I3 2 , 133. J 44, H8, 176, 215, 288. 
Pro-sileni, 85. 
Protagoras, 158. 
Proteus, 214. 
Proverbs (book of), 267, 268 n., 269, 

303, 308 n., 324 n. 
Psalms (book of), 243. 
Psalmist, 323. 



Ptolemaeus, 232, 294. 
Ptolemies, 190. 
Ptolemy, 175 n. 
Punic wars, 276. 
Pyramids, 191, 243. 
Pyrenees, 143. 
Pyrrho, 227, 234. 
Pythagoras, 216, 289. 
Pythias, 88 n. 
Python, 126, 134, 138. 



QUATREMERE, 1 26 n. 

Quinet (Edgar), 58, 61, 71, 169 n., 
284 n. 



R. 



Rabbis, 258, 289, 295, 296, 301. 

Rachel, 75, 202 n., 267. 

Racine, 262 11. 

Rajas, 30, 36. 

Rama, 33, 34, 35, 36, 39, 40, 41, 42, 

44, 45> 46, 265, 320. 
Rama Parasu, 29, 30. 
Ramayana, v, 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 1 1, 38, 

39, 42, 44, 45, 46, 140, 241, 295. 
Rameses, 191, 243. 
Raphael, 246 n. 
Raphaim, 246 n. 
Ravaisson, 280. 
Ravana, 41, 45, 46, 92. 
Rawlinson, 199 n., 26011. 
Reason, 302, 310, 331. 
Rebecca, 242, 260 n. 
Rectitude, 332. 
Red Sea, 144 n. 
Religions, 39. 
Renan (Ernest), 20 n., 98 n., 293, 

296 n. , 297. 
Rennell, 206, 214 n. 
Reville, 317 n. 
Revolution, 328. 
Reynaud (Jean), 60. 
Rhea, 94 n., 135 n. 
Rhine, 310, 315. 
Rig- Veda, 7, 11, 15, 16, 17, 21 n., 

24 n., 25, 30, 31, 32, 35, 36, 37. 
Right, 331. 
Rishis, 34, 42, 53. 
Roland, 70 n., 241. 
Roily, 214 n. 
Roman Lady, 286. 
Romans,^ 303, 315. 
Roma- S a, 18 



Index. 



345 



Rome, 57, 70 n., 84, 90 n.. 103, 
14;, a 274. 275, 276, 27S, 279, 
2S0, 283, 2^4, ^ s 5. 286, 295, 306, 
307, 30S, 317, 331. 

Romish Mythology, 317 a. 

Ronchaud (de), 156 n. 
< 7- '"■ 
ilini, 190. 

Roumania, 317. 

Rousseau, 116, 330. 

Roxbtuy, 19 n. 

Ruinart, 315 n. 

Russell (II.), 9. 
Ru>-ia, 90 n., 255 n. 
Rustam, 74. 

Ruth, 202 n., 253, 270, 271. 



Sabaoth, 212. 

Sabarius, 163, 21S, 223, 224, 227, 

. 7, 269 n. 

Saint Galb, 254. 

Saint Hilaire, 13, 118 n., 135 n., 

136 n. 
Saint Ticrre (Bernardin de), 9. 
Sakuntala, 35. 
Salambo, 203, 204. 
Salamis, 71, $5, 117, 151, 152, 155, 

159, 162, 163 n., 164. 
Salome, 310 n. 
Samalkis, 203. 
Samaria, 240. 
Samothracea, 87. 
Samothracians, 135 n. 
Samuel, 75 n. 
Samson, 246. 
Sanskrit, 52. 
Sappho, 175, 176. 
Sarah, 202 n., 263, 267. 
Sarai, 75 n. 
Sassanides, 71, 72. 
Satan, 59, 243 n. , 303, 329. 
Satou, 196 n., 197 n. 
Saturn, 107. 
Satyrs, 219. 
Saul. 241 n. 
Savaresi. 260 n. 
Savary, 260 n. 
Scandinavia, 107. 
Schoolmen, 191, 257. 
Schwartz, 69 n. 
Science, 331. 
Scipio, 238. 
Scribes, 257, 295 n. 



Scythia, 144 n. 

Seidon, 199, 239, 240. 

Seine, 315. 

Selden, 238, 

Seleni, 85 n. 

Semele, 104, 174, 224. 

Semiramis, 201, 206, 207, 209, 235. 

Seneca, 286, 308. 

Septuagint, 256. 

Serapis, 275, 286, 317. 

Servia, 123 n. 

Sesostris, 235, 243, 270. 

Se-tus Kmpiricus, 202 n. 

Seven Sages, 222. 

Shah Nameh, vii, 35, 55, 72, 74, 79 , 
139 n., 241. 

Sliakespeare, 161, 176, 329. 

Sheba, 269 n. 

Sheik, 244 n. 

Shulamite, 259, 260, 265, 

Siberia, 330. 

Sibyl, 120, 2S8, 311. 
Sicily, S7, 90, 91, 98 n., 115, 143 n., 
171, 175 n., 217 n., 220, 221, 222. 
Siegfried, 140. 
Silenus, 219. 

Simon the Pharisee, 301 n. 
Simon the Leper, 301 n. 
Sinai, 179, 198 n. 
Sirens, 143 n., 200 n. 
Sistine Chapel, 153. 
Sita, 33, 34, 35, 36, 40, 41, 44, 46, 

92, 265. 
Siva, 185. 
Slavery, 313 n. 
Smyrna, 129 n. 
Socrates, 99, 116, 158, 215 n., 216, 

2F7. 234, 252, 280, 281, 306. 
Sogdiana, 16. 
Solomon, 202, 239, 259 n., 261, 267, 

268, 269, 303, 308 n., 324 n. 
Solon, 75 n., 112, 280. 
Soma, 19, 21, 22, 23, 52, 213. 
Song of Songs (the), 203, 259, 260, 

261, 267, 268, 269, 274 n., 292. 
Sons of the Star, 290. 
Sophia, 296 n., 302 n. 
Sophistes, 164, 171, 172. 
Sophocles, 122, 153, 154, 155, 156, 

157, 158, 160, 161, 166 n., 171, 

172, 173. 
Soteira, 87. 
Spain, 316. 
Sparta, 112, 113, 114, 116, 117, 118, 

1 19» I33> J 36, 141. 159- 
Sphinx, 101, 153, 172, 180. 
Spiegel, 66 n. 
Spielberg, 330. 



346 



Index. 



Steevenson, 19 n. 

Steinthall, 125 n. 

Stephen (Saint), 302. 

Sterne, 271 n. 

Stoa, 281. 

Stoic, 105, 154, 170, 281, 285, 295, 
308, 309. 

Stoicism, 282. 

Strabo, 200 n., 202 n., 232, 240. 

Strasbourg, 207 n. 

Strauss, 98 n. , 293. 

Stromata, 310 n. 

Sudras, 32. 

Suez, 198, 243 n. 

Sultans, 190. 

Surya, 62. 

Susa, 272. 

Susiana, 69 n. 

Sylla, 275, 283. 

Syracuse, 1 59, 212. 

Syria, 6911., 135 n., 151, 172, 182, 
186, 196, 198, 199, 200 n., 203, 
204, 205, 212, 213, 214, 220, 234, 
238, 239 n., 240, 257, 259, 260, 
261, 268, 269, 273, 274, 285, 290, 

3P3» 317. 
Syrian orgies, 223. 
Syrian women, 199, 201, 203, 205, 

214, 267, 269, 272, 273. 



T. 



Tacitus, 117, 315, 316. 

Taenarus, 148. 
Talmud, 236 n., 295 n. 
Talmudists, 214 n. 
Tamar, 200 n., 249. 
Tantalus, 88. 
Tarsus, 302. 
Tartar races, 144 n. 
Tartarus, 148. 
Tauris, 142. 
Taurobolia, 307. 
Taygetus, 136, 272. 
Tchinevat, 65. 
Tchitrakouta, 33. 
Telemachus, 107, 108 n. 
Tempe, 139, 147. 
Teneriffe, 196 n. 
Terebinth, 240. 
Terra-mater, 84, 85, 145. 
Tertullian, 312 n., 314, 315 n. 
Teutomaniacs, 315. 
Thammuz- Adonis, 135. 
Thargelia, 157. 
Thebans, 228. 

Thebes, 87, 109, 143 n., 191, 221, 
2.;o. 



Thekla, 302, 304. 

Themis, 87, 101, 167, 231, 281, 331. 

Themistocles, 117, 127, 154, 155, 

162, 225. 
Theocritus, 268. 
Theognis, 115. 
Theophrastus. 227. 
Theopompus, 113 n. 
Theoxemies, 134 n. 
Thermopilae, 87, 125, 132. 
Theseus, 101, 117, 141, 161, 177. 
Thesmophoria, 75 n., 95, 174m, 215. 
Thessalonians, 112. 
Thessaly, 125, 128, 137, 139, 141, 

147, 221, 222, 223. 
Thomas (Saint), 292, 329. 
Thoth, 192, 193. 
Thrace, 142, 172, 221, 223. 
Thracia, 213 n., 220, 221, 222. 
Thrasea, 279. 
Thucydides, 116, 155, 174. 
Thyades, 136, 220. 
Tiberius, 275, 308, 315. 
Tibullus, 273, 274 n. 
Tilly, 283. 

Titan, 86, 165, 166, 167, 168, 170. 
Titans, 100, 102, 218. 
Tithonous, ill. 
Tityrus, 242 n. 
Tobias, 242, 267. 
Tobit (book of), 263, 270. 
Tournier, 115 n., 145 n. 
Trajan, 317. 
Transylvania, 317. 
Triptolemus, 95, 101, 160. 
Troy, 106, 107, 128, 141, 230, 275. 
Truce (the god of), 133. 
Tubal-cain, 242. 
Tullia, 274. 
Tunis, 321 n. 
Turan, 55, 68. 
Turkomans, 72. 

Typhon, 186, 188, 189 n., 190, 245. 
Tyre, 199 n., 238, 239, 240. 
Tyro, 285. 



U. 



Ulloa, 262. 
Ulpian, 316. 
Ulysses, 46, 107, 108, in, 115, 124, 

127, 139. 225, 230. 
United States of America, 255 n. 



V. 

Vacherot, 280 n. 
Valmiki, ii, 38. 



Index. 



347 



Vannozza, 275. 
Varouna, 23. 

Vedas, v, 7, 26, 27, 28, 31, 36, 45, 
46, 54, 62, 82, 87, 101, 107, 213, 

231- 
Veins, 320. 

Venus, 165, 200, 216 n., 233. 
Venus- Aphrodite, 129 n. 
Venus- Ashtoreth, 135 n. 
Venus-Astart6, 173. 
Venus-Ery-cina, 307. 
.: >o n. 
Venus of Babel, 207, 209. 
Venus- Urania, 95 n., 298 n. 
Verres, 277. 

Vestal, 311. 

• & 

270. 
Victory (the statue of), 318. 

utra, 31, 36, 53. 
Vincent de Paul, 326 n. 
Vincent of Beauvais, 300 n. 
Virgil, 242 n., 268, 274, 276 n. 

Virgin Mary, 301. 

Visconti, 175 n. 

Vishnu, 4, 14, 29, 30, 34. 

Visigoths, 319. 

Vivien de St. Martin, 25 n. 

Volney, 7. 

Volumnia, 274. 

Vulcan, 101, 102, 109, 166, 168. 

Vulture, 1S4. 

W. 

Wallenstein, 283. 
Wallon, 313 n. 



278, 



Walter Scott, 116. 
Wette (De), 271, 272. 
Winckelman, 156. 
Wisdom, 289, 310, 311. 
Wisdom (book of), 270. 
Word (the), 256, 321. 



Xanthus, 202 n.. 

Xenophon, 107, 108 n., 112, 116, 118, 
121 n., 123 n., 125, 227, 229, 234. 
Xerxes, 152, 183. 



Y. 



Vac;na, 61. 
Yadoo, 239 n. 
Varna, 63. 
Vazatas, 58. 
Vim a, 75. 



Zacharias, 298. 

Zagreus, 163, 172, 215. 

Zechariah, 135 n. 

Zend, 52. 

Zeno, 157, 232, 281, 282, 306, 309. 

Zeus, 82, 86, 88 n., 91, 102, 103, 104, 

129 n., 165, 166 n., 168, 216. 
Zeus-Sabazius, 225. 
Zoroaster, 23, 60, 61, 75, 78, 80. 
Zoroastrian, 73, 239 n. 
Zohah, 68. 



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easy to account for, than that worship which was once sogenerallv offered to the Serpent-God. 
If not the oldest, it ranks at least among the earliest forms through which the human intellect 
sought to propitiate the unknown powers 

"In so far as such glimmerings as we possess enable us to guess the locality of its origin, I 
would feel inclined to say that it came from the mud of the Lower Euphrates, among a people 
of Turanian origin, and spread thence as from a centre to every country or land of the Old 
World in which a Turanian people settled. Apparently no Semitic, or no people of Aryan 
race, ever adopted it as foim of faith. It is true, we find it in Judea, but almost certainly it 
was there an outcrop from the older underlying strata of the population. We find it also in 
Greece and in Scandinavia, among people whom we know principally as Aryan, but there, 
too, it is like the tares of a previous crop springing up among the stems of a badly cultivated 
field of wheat. The essence of Serpent-Worship is as diametrically opposed to the spirit of 
the Veda, or of the Bible, as is possible to conceive two faiths to be ; and, with varying degrees 
of dilution, the spirit of these two works pervades in a greater or less extent all the forms of 
the religions of the Aryan or Semitic races. On the other hand, any form of Animal worship 
is perfectly consistent with the lower intellectual status of the Turanian races ; and all history 
tells us that it is among them, and essentially among them only, that Serpent-Worship is really 
found to prevail."— Extract from Introduction. 

FABER'S ORIGIN OF PAGAN IDOLATRY, 

Ascertained from Historical Testimony and Circumstantial Evidence. Map 
and plates. 3 vols, 4to, half calf, neat. $50.00. Very Scarce. 

London, 1816. 
This important, and now scarce work, represents all the Religious Systems of Antiquity. 



Rare and Valuable Books. 
ANCIENT FAITHS 

EMBODIED IN ANCIENT NAMES ; or, An Attempt to trace the Reli- 
gious Belief, Sacred Rites, and Holy Emblems of certain Nations, by an In- 
terpretation of the Names given to Children by Priestly Authority, or assumed 
by Prophets, Kings, and Hierarchs. By Thomas Inman, M.D. 2 thick 
volumes, upward of 1,000 pp. each. Profusely illustrated with Engravings 
on Wood. $20.00. Loudon, Printed for the Author, 1868-70. 

Only 500 copies printed. 

" Dr. Inman's present at'empt to trace the religious belief, sacred rites, and hclv emblems of 
certain nations, has opened up to him many hitherto unexplored fields of research, or. at least, 
fields that have not been over-cultivated, and the result is a most curious and miscellaneous 
harvest of facts. The ideas on priapism developed in a former volumi* receive further exten- 
sion in this Dr. Inman. as will be seen, does not fear to touch subjects usuallv considered 
sacred, in an independent manner, and some of the results at which he has arrived are such 
as will undoubtedly startle, if not shock, the orthodox. Hut this is what the author expects, 
and for this he has thoroughly prepared himself. In illustration of his peculiar v ews. he has 
ransacked a vast variety of histoiical storehouses, and with great trouble and at considerable 
cost he places the conclusions at which he has arrived before the world. W ith the arguments 
employed, the majority of readers will, we expect, disagree ; even when the facts adduced 
will remain undisputed, their application is frequently inconsequent. In showing the absurdity 
of a narrative or an event in which he disbelieves, the Doctor is powerful • but when he him- 
self ventures upon a chain of arguments or propounds doctrines, positive or negative, he 
usually appears to disadvantage. No expense has been spared on the volume, which, like the 
previous one. iv -.yell and fully illustrated, and conlains a good Index. "— Bookstllcr. 

A most Important Contribution to Archaeological Science. 

A DISCOURSE ON THE WORSHIP OF PRIAPUS, 

and its connecection with the Mystic Theology of the Ancients. By Richard 
Payne Knight, Esq. A New Edition. To which is added AN ESSAY 
ON THE WORSHIP OF THE GENERATIVE POWERS DURING 
THE MIDDLE AGES OF WESTERN EUROPE. Illustrated with 138 
Engravings (many of which are full-page), from Ancient Gems, Coins, Medals, 
Bronzes, Sculpture. Egyptian Figures, Ornaments, Monuments, etc. Printed, 
on heavy paper, at the Chiswick Press. I vol. 4to. half Roxburghe morocco, 
gilt top. $35.00. London, privately printed, 1871. 

" This is a very extraordinary volume upon a subject that is now attracting the almost uni- 
versal attention of the learned and curious in Euro»e. 

1,1 Ever ^ince the revival of learning, strange objects have from time to time been discovered 
— objects which, although they mav amaze or anr.se the weak-minded, have induced earnest 
students to inquire into their origin and true meaning. Various matters and discoveries 
assisted in clea-ing up the mystery ; the emblems and symbols gradually explained their full 
meaning, and the outlines of an extraordinary creed unfolded itself. It was the DIV1N1TE 
GENERATRIO — the worship or adoration of the God PR I A l'US— the ancient svmbol of 
generation and fertility. The Round Towers in Ireland; similar buildings in India; the May- 
pole in England. and er-ett ihe spires rf our churches, are roiv shivi t" be nothing wore nor 
less than existing symbols rf ihis pagan and strarge ivor&Jup. Almost all the great relics of 
antiquity bear traces of this impious adoration— the rock caves of Elephant*, near Bombay, 
the earth and stone mounds of Europe. Asia, and America theDruidical piles and the remains 
of the sn-called Fire-worshippers in '-very nait of the world. Even existing popular customs 
and beliefs are full of remnants of this extravagant devotion. 

V R. P. Knight, the writer cf the fir t ' Essav", was a Fellow of the Royal Societv. a Member 
of the I'ritish Parliament, and one of the most learned antiquaries of his time His Museum 
of Phallic objects is now most carefully preserved in thr London British Musnem. '1 he 
second' Essav,' bringing our knowledge of the worship of Priapus down to the present time, 
so as to include the more recent discoveries throwing anv light upon the matter, is said to 
be by one of the most distinguished English antiquaries — the author of numerous works which 
are held in high esteem. He was assisted, it is understood, by two prominent Fellows of the 
Royal Society, one of whom has recently presented a wonderful collection of Phallic objects 
to the British Museum authorities." 



Rare and Valuable Books. 
THE ROSICRUCIANS: 

THEIR RITES AND MYSTERIES. With Chapters on th Ancient Fire- 
and Serpent- Worshippers, and Explanations of the Mystic oymbols repre- 
sented in the Monuments and Talismans of the primeval Philosophers. By 
HARGRAVE JENNINGS. Crown Svo, 316 wood-engravings. $3.00. 

London, 1870. 
A volume of startling facts and opinions upon this very mysterious subject. 

HIGGINS'S ANACALYPSIS: 

An attempt to draw aside the veil of the Saitic Isis, or an Inquiry into the 
Origin of languages, Nations, and Religions. 3 vols, in 1. 4to, morocco, gilt. 
Plates. Very scarce. $75 .00. London, 1833-36. 

On page yii. of ihe Preface this passage occurs: " I have printed onlv 200 copies of this 
work ; of these 200 only a few got at nrst into circulation. The tendency of the work is to 
overturn all the established systems of religion, to destroy received notions upon subjects 
generally considered sacred. and to substitute a simple unsacerdotal worship. Names hitherto 
looked upon with veneration by the world are stripped of their honors, and others are lifted 
from opprobrium to a position of reverence.'' 

HIGGINS'S CELTIC DRUIDS: 

An attempt to -how that the Druids were the Priests of Oriental Colonies, who 
emigrated from India. 45 fine plates of Druidical Remains, on India Paper, 
and numerous vignettes. 4to f half calf. $22.50. London, 1829. 

BHAGVAT GEETA ; 

or, Dialogues of KREESHNA and Arjoon ; in 18 Lectures, with Notes, 
translated from the Original Sanskreet by Charles Wilkins. 8vo, hand- 
n ted on fine paper. $3 . 00 

London, 17S5, reprinted New York, 1867. 
Only 16 r copies. 

Contains curious details of the Manners, Customs, Mythology, Worship, &c, of the 
Hindoos. 

The principal design of these dialogues seems to have been to unite all the prevailing modes 
of worship of those days ; the Brahmins esteem it to contain all the grand mysteries of their 
relig on. and have exercised particular care to conceal it from the knowledge of those of a 
different persuasion. 

AVESTA: THE RELIGIOUS BOOKS OF THE PAR- 
SEES. 

From Professor Spiegel's German Translation of the Original Manuscripts, 
by A. H. Bi.eeck. 3 vols, in I. 8vo, cloth. $7.50 London, 1864. 

English scholars, who wish to become acquainted with the " Bible of the Parsees," now for 
the first time published in English, should secure this work. 

To thinkers the " Avesta" will be a most valuable work ; they will now have an opportunity 
to compare its Tkuths with those of the Bible the Koran, and the Veds. 

COLEMAN'S MYTHOLOGY OF THE HINDUS, 

with Notices of various Mountain and Island Tribes inhabiting the two Pen- 
insulas of India. Numerous engravings of Hindoo Deities. 4to, half calf, neat. 
Scarce. $11.00. London, 1832. 

The Appendix in this valuable work comprises the Minor Avatars and the terms used in the 
Worship and Ceremonies of the Hindus. 



Rare and Valuable Books. 

A SUFPLEMENT TO PAYNE KNIGHTS " WORSHIP OF PRIAPUS. 



APHRODISIACS AND ANTI-APHRODISIACS. 

Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction ; with some account of the Judi- 
cial "Congress" as practiced in France during the Seventeenth Century. By 
John Davenport. With eight full-page illustrations. 

Printed on toned paper, and only One Hundred Copies for private distribution. 
Small 4to, half morocco, gilt top. $12.00. London, 1870. 

Before the Aryan and the Semitic races had made a record in history, aboriginal peoples 
occupied India, Arabia, and the countries of the Mediterranean. They were not barbarous, 
tor their monumental remains show that their knowledge of architecture, the mechanic arts, 
and astronomy, has not been exceeded in subsequent time. Their civilization, however, was 
peculiar ; for the religious comprehended the political system, and worship made science and 
art its ministers Unconscious of harm or immodesty, they adored the Supreme Being as the 
Essential Principle of Life ; and expressed their veneration by symbols which, in their simple 
apprehension, best expressed the Divine Functions. The Sun, possessing and diffusing the 
triune potencies of Heat, Light, and Actinism, was a universal emblem of God ; as was the 
Bull, the zodiacal sign which indicated the vernal equinox and the resuscitation of Time. With 
equal aptness and propriety the human organs of sex, as representing Divine Love and the 
Perpetuation of Animated Existence, were also adopted as symbols of the Deity, and models 
of them employed at all religious festivals. 

Those symbols were adopted by the Aryan conquerors of India, and incorporated into the 
Brahmin worship ; and we find remains of the pre-historical religion in modern creeds, super- 
stitions, and architecture. The Monumental Shaft, the Cross, the Church-Spire, appear to 
have been derived from the archiac worship just noted, and mean alike the virile symbol and 
the life everlasting. 

Mr. Davenport has given these matters a due explanation, and his work is a rare as well as 
a valuable contribution to literature. 

Mr. Daveitporf s Neiv Work. 

CURIOSITATES EROTICA PHYSIOLOGIA; 

or, Tabooed Subjects Truly Treated. In six Essays. Viz. — 1. Generation ; 2. 
Chastity and Modesty ; 3. Marriage ; 4. Circumcision ; 5. Eunuchism ; 6. Herma- 
phrodism ; and followed by a closing Essay on Death. By John Davenport. 
1 vol. 4to, half morocco, gilt top. $12.00. London, Privately printed, 1875. 

THE DABISTAN, OR SCHOOL OF MANNERS. 

Translated from the Original Persian, with Notes and Illustrations by David 
Shea and Anthony Troyer. 3 vols. 8vo, new cloth. $7.50. 

Oriental Society, London, 1843. 

An interesting account of the Religions of the world, written by an unknown writer, of the 
greatest interest to Oriental scholars and comparative mythologists. 

WILKINSON'S ANCIENT EGYPTIANS, 

The Manners and Customs of. Both Series, with numerous engravings, 
many of which are colored. 6 vols. 8vo, tree calf extra, gilt top, edges uncut, 
scarce. $90.00 London, 1837-41. 

A Beautiful Copy. Best Edition. 

ZEND-AVESTA, 

Ouvrage de Zoroastre, contenant ses idees theologiques, physiques, et morales, 
le culte religieux qu'il a etabli, et plusieurs traites sur l'ancienne histoire des 
Perses ; traduit en Francais, avec des remarques, &c, par Anquetil du Per- 
ron. 2 vols, in 3, 4to, plates, old French calf gilt. $35.00. Paris, 1771. 



Rare and Valuable Books. 
BRYANT'S SYSTEM OF ANTIENT MYTHOLOGY. 

3d Edition ; with Life of the Author, Index, &c. Portrait and Plates 6 vols 
Svo, cf. gilt. $15.00. London, iSoi. 

DAVIES' MYTHOLOGY AND RITES OF THE BRIT 
ISII DRUIDS, 

ertained by National Documents with Appendix, &c, &c. Royal 8vo 
half calf. $6.00. London. 1809! 

CelUc Researches and Mythology of the Druids are full of that 
curious information wuj h is preserved nowhere but in Welsh remains."— Southey. 

FABER'S DISSERTATION ON THE MYSTERIES OF 
THE CABIR1 ; 

of Phoenicia, Egypt, Troas, Greece, &c, &c. Front. 2 vols, 
calf, neat. $9.00. Prin /, -d for the Author, Oxford, 1S03. 

"This work establishes the justice of the remark made on the author's profound acquaint- 
. Uquitj'. in this respect, it is second only to 'he Aucient Mvtholoev of Hnanr " 

THORPE'S NORTHERN MYTHOLOGY; 

The Popular Traditions and Superstitions of Scandinavia. North Germany, and 
the Netherlands ; a View of German Mythology, or Popular Belief, from the 
ay to Belgium, anil from the Earliest Times down to the Pre- 
sent. Selected and Translated. 3 vols, small Svo, half morocco. $6.00. 

London, 1852. 

MOOR'S HINDU PANTHEON. 

451 pages o{ text, and upwards of 100 fine plates of Hindoo Deities. Thick 
royal ato. full Russia neat. $37.50. London, 1810. 

A valuable work, naiv quite scarce. 

HERCULANUM ET POMPEII. 

Recueil Generai des Peintures, Bronzes, Mosaiques, &c, decouverts 

jusqu'a ce jour et reproduits d'apres tousles ouvrages publies jusqu'a present, 

avee un Texte explicatif de M. Bane, with 700 fine engravings, 8 vols, impe 

rial Svo (including the MuSEE Secrete), French bds., lettered. $45.00. 

Paris, Didot, 1863. 

This is the most complete work on the discoveries at Herculaneum and Pompeii, exhibiting 
all the paintings, bronzes, miniatures, &c, hitherto published in rare or expensive works, with 
the addition of many others which have not previously appeared. 

MAURICE'S INDIAN ANTIQUITIES. 

Numerous plates, chiefly illustrative of the Ancient Worships of India. 7 
vols. Svo, half morocco, gilt top. $20.00. London, 1800. 

A very curious work, containing Dissertations relative to the ancient geographical divisions, 
the pure system of primeval theolo y, the grand code of civil laws, the original form of gov- 
ernment, the widely extended commerce, and the various and profound literature of Hindostan ; 
compared throughout with the religion, laws, government, and literature of Persia, Egypt, 
and Greece, the whole intended as introductory to the history of Hindostan, upon a compre- 
hensive scale. 



Rare and Valuable Books. 

PETRIE'S ECCLESIASTICAL ARCHITECTURE OF 
IRELAND, 

Anterior to the Anglo-Norman invasion. Numerous engravings of the Rou>D 

Towers and other Architecture. 4to, cloth. $20.00. London, 1845. 

Lar3R paper, scarce. 

This work comprises the Prize Essay on the Origin and Uses of the Round Towers of Ire- 
land, greatly enlarged ; and distinct Essays on ancient Stone Churches, &c, of cotempora- 
neous ages. 

UPHAM'S BUDDHISM, 

History and Doctrine of, populary illustrated with Notices of Kappoo- 
ism, of Demon-Worship, and of the Bali or Planetary Incantations of Ceylon. 
43 plates from Sinhalese Designs. Folio, half calf neat. $ig.co. 
Scarce. London, 1829. 

SECRET MUSEUM OF NAPLES. 

Being an account of the Erotic Paintings, Bronzes, and Statues contained in 
that famous " Cabinet Secret." By Colonel Fanin. Now first translated 
from the French. With sixty full-pag- illustrations, mostly colored. 1 vol., 
medium 4to, half polished morocco, gilt top. $40.00. London, 1872. 

These relics, in which science takes so lively nn in'.erest, have survive 1 the lapse of centu- 
ries. They have been preserved in the womb of the e^"th t!b transmit to future generations 
the lessons of history. Those which we have chosen > form the subject of this bock were 
discovered in some of those towns situated on 'he side of Vesuvius which had been buried 
under its volcanic ashes: — we allude to Herculaneum. Pompeii, and Stabia 

During more than sixteen hundred years even the sites of these destroyed cit'es were un- 
known : learned men were still at controversy on the subject at the beginning of the eighteenth 
century when chance led to the discovery in a country-seat of the Duke of Lorraine, at Por- 
tia, of a fruitful mine of objects of Art and Antiquities ot all kinds. The king of the' tivo 
Sicilies caused excavations to be made, and in the month of December, 1738, the theatre of 
Herculaneum was found. The excavations made at this period, and continued down to our 
days, have furnished the Neapolitan government witli the richest, most instructive, and most 
interesting collection of antiquities. 

This work was originally published by the Italian government, and given to men of science 
and learned institutions only. It is now for the first time presented in an English translation, 
with all of the illustrations of the original edition. 

ASIATIC RESEARCHES; 

or, Transactions of the Society for inquiring into the History, Antiquities. Arts, 

Literature, etc. of Asia, by the most eminent Oriental Scholars. 12 vols. Svo, 

Russia gilt. $20.00. London, iSoi-6* 

Contains the learned Essays by Colebrooke, Sir William Jones, Carey, Strachey, Dr. YVal- 
lich. koxburgh, &c. 

KING (C. W.), THE GNOSTICS 

And their Remains, ANCIENT AND Medi/EVAL. Profusely illustrated. Svo, 
new cloth gilt. $7.50. London, 1S64. 

*** The only English work on the subject. Out 0/ print and scarce. 

VISHNU PURANA, 

A system of Hindu Mythology and Tradition translated from the original 

Sanscrit, and illustrated by Notes derived chiefly from other Puranas, by 

H i I. Wilson. Thick 4to. clo.li. $525.00. London, 1840. 

The " Vishnu I'urana" embodies the real doctrine of the lnd ! m S< ripture, the " Unity ot the 
Deity." This edition was published by the Oriental Translation Society, but is quite out ol 
orint and raie. 











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